IT'S painting time. And we're not talking Vincent Van Gogh. But suddenly we’re feeling a little more in tune with the slashing off of the ear thing.
We have finally got around to painting our bedroom. The four little sample squares of test-pot emulsion that greeted us like Edelweiss every morning have now disappeared.
The new paint looks rather lovely in a "it's not quite magnolia" kind of a way. Mind you, it is not a kick in the ass off magnolia.
But it has a lovely name straight off an expensive lipstick counter or a national art gallery... anyone for “Impression Sunrise”?
True painters exhibit such a dedication to their task that eventually you have to leave them alone to get on with it.
But I was the painter’s mate for all of an afternoon, stirring up big builder’s cups of brew and standing back to squint at the wall from a distance.
“You missed a bit there,” I said.
"Why don't we get a man in," I said, burning any feminist credentials I might have had.
But my man was not for turning. He was all geared up with the big, the small and the radiator rollers and he was a man on a mission.
The painting is not the problem. It is the preparation. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs and you can't paint a room without removing the junk, evicting the resident house spiders, dusting and washing the walls and driving your wife to wonder what junk she has accumulated in 23 years of the bliss they call matrimony.
"You are so so lucky," says my mother. She tells me that 10 times a day. Apparently I married a paragon with a paintbrush.
He is also a perfectionist. There will be no truncated dancing ladies on the wallpaper, you shall not see joins along the wall, the skirting boards will be glossed to perfection.
And for a few hours, I join him, the painter's apprentice in a pair of old jeans that fit ever so snugly and my oldest T shirt.
Mine are the corners, along the skirting board – all the edges while he rolls his way along the main walls.
It is a slow and silent communion, punctuated by the soft slap of the paintbrush and the ruckle of a roller along a plastic painting tray.
We don’t talk, we just work our way around the room, side by side.
On a soft afternoon, it beats an office and the blue light of a computer screen.
Somewhere in the mists of time, my great grandparents cut turf on a Donegal bog, working side by side and stopping for a sup of cold tea, to lie back on the grass and enjoy the wonder of it all.
Somewhere, my grandfather took a moment’s peace as he drove the train through Donegal and rested his eyes on the far horizon and the beauty of the Blue Stacks.
And closer to home, there is my father fresh from painting the bedroom a soft pink – with a shower of confetti pink spots all down his front just to prove he has done it.
And my mother is looking at the room painted in the shade she chose. Her mouth is saying: “That’s lovely,” her eyes are screaming: “What Barbie hell am I going to have to sleep in for the next 20 years?”
And as we paint in companionable silence, the years drift back to that first apartment. It was our first joint painting enterprise and it took a week to complete from the steep stairs to the tiny kitchen where you couldn’t quite swing the smallest of kittens.
I chose the lightest carpets – to hell with practicality – and insisted that all visitors remove their shoes, Japanese style, at the door , because the carpets cost a month’s salary.
The shade of the walls was apricot white. We have moved on since then and travelled from soft yellow for a baby’s nursery to golden yellow and on to a rich red terracotta which, says my painter boss and soul mate, has now had its day.
We are thinking soft greens now – spring meadows and lightness – places to rest.
And if, in distant years, a stranger wrenched open the door to our shed and brushed in past the cobwebs, then, in the corner he would find a stack of old rusting paint tins that tell a story, our story – in the dribs and drabs of colour from our walls.
