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We get hold of a tube of oil paint, squeeze it out, add a bit of turpentine to thin it out, and off we go, not thinking too much about what’s actually in that tube. You need two things to make paint: a finely ground coloured powder called pigment, and something to bind your pigment so that it sticks to your chosen surface and stays there. Over the centuries, artists tried a lot of gooey stuff and for a long time, egg yolk -called Tempera painting – was a popular binder.

But tempera is difficult to blend. It dries very quickly and in order to create volume, you have to put down shading in a lot of small strokes – kind of like cross hatching. You can’t gently blend tones from light to dark. Then in the early 1400s, some chaps in the Low Countries, mainly Jan Van Eyck , discovered that if you mixed oil into your paint it was a lot more flexible and luminous and there was a big leap:

They experimented with a variety of oils – but in the end, linseed oil was the business. It is flexible, durable and importantly for us starving artist -types, affordable. You can get boiled and raw linseed oil at your hardware store, and the refined, pricier version for painting at the art shop. My love for the stuff started when I was a teen, curing my first cricket bat – it took many coatings of oil. The oil had a lovely aroma and made me think about walking onto the pitch, calmly surveying the enemy field, and then smacking a perfect cover drive like my hero Graeme Pollock.

Eventually my bat was ready for action and I found myself in a real cricket match. I was somewhere in the middle order and our openers in the Jeppe under 13 b team had not fared well. My turn came, sooner than I thought it would. I fumblingly strapped on the leg pads and headed to the middle. The bowler gave me the evil eye and then walked back to his mark. And then he walked even further back. Crikey! He came charging in from miles out . I closed my eyes and put the bat in front of me. The ball glanced off the bat and shot away, all the way to boundary. Four runs! Alas, that was my finest moment. Three deliveries later I got bowled out. Not long afterwards, I was dropped from the team and frankly I didn’t mind. Now I had more time to work on my poster of Percy Sledge.

The only drawback to linseed oil is the same thing that made it popular in the first place – it dries slowly. Artists have tried a lot of ways of speeding up the drying, not all good. The answer for me was hidden in the covers of this book, published in 1949:

There, on page 105, is the secret: sun- thickened linseed oil.

You lay out your oil in a flat dish, about half a centimetre deep, and you cover it with a glass lid. It musn’t be sealed – you leave a small gap for air flow between dish and lid. You have to be careful that dust and stuff doesn’t get into the oil, and this is difficult when you’re leaving it in the sun for a week or more. No matter what you do, stuff finds its way in. You keep your eye on it and jostle it around a bit to prevent a film forming over the top. Once the oil has reached the consistency of honey and has several bugs in it, you’re ready to go.

According to Doerner, “it dries with a certain gloss, and has been used for centuries as an excellent painting medium, by Rubens among others. It gives the colours an enamel- like character and permits, despite its viscidity, a great amount of technical freedom. Cennini (b1370 ) called it the best of oils.”

Linseed is also called flaxseed, and when cold- pressed (and definitely not left out in the sun,) you can add it to your diet. Yes people, its very good for you. Mahatma Gandhi knew that too, “whenever flaxseed becomes a regular item among the people, there will be better health,” he said.

And one last thing. Linoleum. You remember the dark brown linoleum we use to make linocuts? The main component of that sweet- smelling stuff is linseed and linseed oil too. Where would we be without the humble linseed?