The only other thing my wife and I had ever before attempted to paint was a single paling on our then newly built front fence. It had taken almost an hour to do what we did of it and as there were another 20 or so to do afterwards, we worked out that we couldn’t possibly finish by tea-time and so paid a professional to do it instead. He insisted on cash so I have no record of his name, but judging from what he charged and the result I assume it was either Paul Klee or Kandisky. We had resolved though to stick with it this time and complete the little cupboard in the backroom ourselves. It wasn’t just the extortionate sum of money we’d otherwise have to part with—it was a matter of pride.

We had already pleasantly surprised ourselves at being able to successfully paint the whole of the kitchen. We’d cheated a bit in that we had simply painted over the faux wood panelling the previous owners had glued onto the plaster, but it looked remarkably good if you liked yellow. More importantly, we hadn’t killed each other as we almost did a month earlier when we’d varnished the floorboards in our hallway. On that occasion we’d pulled up the carpet without incident but the Baltic pine underneath was quite thirsty and required several expensive coats and a number of visits to the Paint Pot before the floor showed any signs of sheen. At three in the morning we’d faced off at each other at either end of the hall with a seething more at home in the Rhode Island manse of Klaus and Sunny von Bülow, both armed with buckets of lacquer and threatening to douse each other if one dared again tell the other how to do a job that neither was qualified to carry out in the first place.