Burns, bites and bruises

Painting the house has turned out to have some unexpected hazards. Not sunburn - after a childhood of pinkness, burns and blistering, I am very careful about avoiding the sun, and plastering myself in sunscreen when exposure is unavoidable. So I'm not sunburnt. I am bitten though - yesterday, I got attacked by a combined squadron of mosquitoes and sandflies when I was up a ladder, one hand holding onto the house and the sander in the other, unable to swat or even jump out of the way. Later in the day, I accidentally knocked over one of the painting trestles and it landed heavily across my right forearm. A potentially spectacular bruise is forming, although at the moment it's just a darkish smear that looks as though I haven't washed for a while.

So I set out on this morning's painting effort well-anointed - first with arnica, on the bruise; then copious amounts of sunblock, and finally some spray-on insect repellent that comes with so many warnings on the can that I can't believe it's actually safe to use. I made it to the end of the day without further injury, although it took some considerable effort to wash all of the above, and a fair bit of spattered undercoat, off myself when I had finished. It certainly gave me plenty of time to consider how great-great-grandma would have coped with such things.

For a start, I guess she wouldn't have had to worry too much about sunburn, because year-round, she was probably swathed head to toe in voluminous garments and multiple layers of underwear. Add a hat and gloves, and the sun wouldn't have got a look in. Neither would the mosquitoes and sandflies - they would have had great difficulty in finding skin. (But great-great-grandpa seems to have managed all right, judging by all those babies.) Heat-stroke would have been more of a risk for Sarah than sunburn. But if she or the kids did get sunburnt, the remedy was probably the same as when I was younger - vinegar, dabbed ever-so-gently onto the burns. It took the sting out, even if it did make you smell like salad dressing. To repel insects, if she had some essential oils like citronella, she could have mixed them with oil to rub on the skin. I found a recipe for an old herbal repellent made by simmering half a cup of feverfew blossoms in a cup of oil for 20 minutes, cooling and then adding vast quantities of chopped garlic. The resulting brew had to be sealed in a jar and spend two weeks on a sunny windowsill before use, so it was obviously something that required forward planning. I suppose if the feverfew wasn't in blossom, that just left garlic - some by mouth, to make your blood unappealing to the bugs, and the rest smeared on the skin - guaranteed to repel insects, along with friends, family and vampires. If the bugs did break through the defences, then rubbing the bite with garlic helped. So did lemon juice. (This is starting to sound like a recipe for salad dressing.)

As for the bruise, arnica is a pretty old-fashioned remedy, and Sarah probably had some in her medicine chest. If not, a liniment made with eucalyptus, camphor and wintergreen oils would probably have been available, as would witch hazel. A family health manual of the 1830s suggests wormwood, the dried leaves moistened with a little vinegar. I think that stuff might be illegal now! The local remedies, which Maori would have used and possibly shared with the early settlers, included boiled kahikatea leaves bandaged to the bruised area, or boiled tutu shoots in a poultice. First find your tutu; this might be easier than obtaining kahikatea leaves, which tend to be at the top of very, very tall kahikatea trees and you would be risking more than bruises to get them. Ice is also good for bruises, not that there would have been much available to great-great-grandma in the summer of 1841. Ice is, however, available to me, although at this stage I feel it is going to be a lot more effective bobbing around in a large glass of rum and coke............

Painting and time travel

Yesterday I became slightly side-tracked from the research by needing to get started on my other summer holiday project - painting my house. Painting one side of it anyway - the master-plan being to paint one side every summer. I meant to start last summer, but procrastinated my way into winter. The weather over the intervening months has removed a large quantity of old paint for me, so being down to bare boards in a number of places, I really have to get on with it.

I spent yesterday morning and this morning, while that side of the house was in shade, water-blasting and scraping. And of course, most of the time I was thinking about what great-great-grandad William, the professional house-painter, would have thought if I could have zapped him through time to lend a hand. Once he had got over the shock of time travel, not to mention the sight of a woman in t-shirt and shorts, he would probably have agreed with me that the previous owners of this house did an appalling job last time they painted it (and possibly the time before that as well). I have to assume it was the owners - I hope nobody got paid to do a job this bad! Anyway, I think William would like the power tools. I am sure he would love the water-blaster, because I sure do - in fact, I might have to fight him for a turn with it. I just love blasting away and seeing great chunks of really bad paint come flying off. Scraping and sanding is not quite so much fun, but there is clear evidence of progress being made. At least it now looks like a work in progress, rather than the neglected dwelling of a slothful home-owner.

It's funny how I have more of a sense of William as a person than I do of Sarah. Maybe it's because I've spent most of the last week chasing him through old newspapers. Maybe it's because I'm more like him than I am like Sarah - not in the sense of looks or characteristics (I'm very much my father's daughter!) but in how I think, and what I do. I have absolutely no idea what it would be like to be a married mother of ten with no life outside the home. I have very little idea of what Sarah's views on her life and her world were. If I zapped her through time, instead of William, how would she react? What would interest her about life in 2008? It might be a good idea to exercise my mind with that next time I get back up the ladder to scrape and sand.