We’ve all been there, one dreary and distant summer holiday or half-term, a tub of acrylic paint in one hand, and in the other a potato oozing with starch. Creating geometric shapes – and the occasional smiley face, flower petal, or simple heart – by slicing potatoes into stencils and stamps is a popular childhood pastime, an evocative relic of our scarcely forgotten youth.
In a recent vlog Alfie Deyes, the man better known to the world via his YouTube handle PointlessBlog, took to reminiscing on his own history with the paint-spattered spud. Describing the unadulterated joy he witnessed on the face of a teenage girl getting ready to exercise in the park, Deyes remembered his own youthful indiscretions, admitting ‘When I was younger I used to do things like, do paintings with potatoes […] like cut potatoes into shapes and stuff and like, do finger painting and play in sandpits’.
The only disclaimer PointlessBlog added is that none of this occurred when he was aged fifteen. Yet with millions of followers speculation is always rife when it comes to Deyes’ private life. And after frenzied conjecture over everything from marriage proposals and pregnancy rumours to the number of sneakers currently in his possession, now PointlessBlog’s fans are demanding to know, just when exactly did all the potato painting cease?
Boasting more than five million subscribers, heading up a virtual business empire with three channels plus books and merch, the presumption is that Deyes – now twenty-two years old – long since tarnished his last tatty. But The Shimmering Ostrich can exclusively reveal that away from the camera, PointlessBlog remains fond of life’s simpler pleasures. Beyond skateboarding and fiddling with remote control cars, he builds forts out of day-old pizza boxes, uses Wagamama containers as makeshift cress pots, and crawls Colin the Caterpillar chocolate mini rolls into his partner Zoella’s anticipating mouth.
So let’s not presume that PointlessBlog stopped painting with potatoes before the age of fifteen. Perhaps he kept the practise up until his sixteenth or seventeenth birthdays, or even until the milestones of eighteen or twenty-one. And perhaps even today, when he’s all tucked up in bed guys, underneath the covers cowers a mountain of discarded potato peel, and two pinky fingers still dripping with paint.
