#24 Everything You Don't Need to Know About Drying Paint

Episode twenty-four of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is titled Everything You Don't Need to Know About Drying Paint, and it delivers exactly what it promises: a slow, warm, thoroughly unhurried journey through the world of paint, drying, and everything loosely connected to it. If you are looking for a sleep podcast, a bedtime podcast, or something to listen to when you want your brain to gently stop doing whatever it has been doing all day, this episode was made for you. It is also, technically, the most comprehensive and least necessary guide to paint drying ever recorded. We consider that an achievement. In this episode, you will learn about solvents and binders and polymer chains, about water-based paint and oil-based paint and their very different feelings about drying times, about humidity and temperature and why painting a bathroom in summer with the window closed is an act of quiet optimism. You will hear about the cave paintings at Lascaux in France, which have been drying for seventeen thousand years and are doing fine, and about Egyptian blue, a synthetic pigment used in ancient Egypt that has remained reliably blue for four and a half thousand years, which is more than can be said for most things. You will hear about Annie Sloan and chalk paint, about Farrow and Ball and their colour names that make grey sound like a lifestyle choice, about Dan Robbins and the paint-by-numbers craze of the nineteen fifties, about VOCs and the smell of fresh paint and what it feels like to stand in an empty room that smells like a beginning. There is a digression about a grandmother making plum jam that takes a while to come back around, and it does, eventually, come back around. There is also a bookcase-shaped impression in a wall, which is the kind of thing that only happens to people who do not read the instructions about curing time, and which we mention without judgment. This podcast is ideal for anyone who uses sleep podcasts or bedtime stories for adults to help them drift off, for anyone who enjoys monotone talking, gentle narration, or the kind of content that it is perfectly fine to miss because nothing important happens and you can always pick it up again tomorrow, or not, because it will still be there, drying quietly. It is also ideal for anyone who has ever searched for ASMR sleep, boring podcast, sleep talk down, or relaxing podcast, and found themselves wanting something a little warmer and a little weirder. The World's Most Boring Podcast is designed for people who like falling asleep to the sound of a calm voice talking about something that doesn't matter, and this episode is a particularly good example of that. It is boring in the best possible way. We are proud of how boring it is. We worked very hard to make it this unremarkable. If you have a topic you would like us to cover, a question, or simply something you would like to share, please write to us at [email protected]. We read everything. We respond at the pace of drying paint. Thank you for listening. Thank you for the forty of you who subscribe. We hope you slept well.