Forth Rail Bridge in “nearly finished” shock. They'll be through painting it soon, apparently. And then (and this is the bit that's hard for fans of idiom to swallow) it won't need redoing for another 20 years or more. It's good news for the painters, I suppose, but a disaster for the language - now officially short of one, off-the-peg, instantly comprehensible metaphor for dismally repetitive, never-ending labour.

In the future, when someone sighs and tells you their job is like painting the Forth Bridge, you will have to infer that they work to a precise schedule, using leading edge materials to produce a durable finish. It's a complete turnaround and hard to think how our common parlance could sustain a blow like it without chalk and cheese being found to share an overwhelming number of physical properties.

Not that painters ever did walk from one end of the Forth Bridge to the other, rinse their brushes and start again. That was an urban myth arising because this 118-year-old monument has its own maintenance department. Still, for more than a century the paintwork on the Forth Bridge has provided a handy modern equivalent for the myth of Sisyphus.

In fact, it was never quite perfect in that regard, lacking the vital twist of utter needlessness provided by its mythological predecessor. The people slapping primer on the Forth Bridge were, after all, performing vital maintenance work on an important public structure, whereas Sisyphus - condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity - was engaged on something ritually pointless and entirely without effect, even if it did foreshadow an awful lot of gym work.

Quibbles aside, though, “painting the Forth Bridge” was a valuable and evocative expression, and there is nobody who has worked in an office who hasn't found cause to reach for it at some point in their life.

Still, let's see its demise positively, as an opportunity to find a respectable, modern substitute. We're looking for a contemporary reference - something mind-bogglingly monotonous, which seems destined to go on for ever, from which no satisfaction can be derived and the point of which has been entirely obscured by repetition.

I'm offering “hounding Britney”. For example: “I've been trying to get those weeds up off the lawn, but it's like hounding Britney.” It's got the core elements, surely: the pointlessness, the sense of an unchanging eternity.

Then again, maybe it would be more within the tradition of the Forth Bridge to evoke a British image. In which case, what about “writing episodes of Emmerdale”? Example: “I only picked up the litter that had blown into our front garden two days ago, but you know what it's like - you're writing episodes of Emmerdale, basically.”

Workable? I don't know. We need something, though. And quickly - as quick as it takes to paint the Forth Bridge.

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