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Red Sky, Purple Sage, Crushed Pine, Autumn Falls, Meteor Silver. . .

Red Sky in the morning, a flamboyant dawn, Monday 25th of October. On the Saturday night we'd had people round for dinner (My B'stilla went very well, to my amazement; I believe Peter's signature chicken and preserved lemon tagine has been better). Half term week, we said. We're going to decorate the stairwell! A slightly anxious silence ensued. The biggest room in the house, said Dinah. Those high ceilings. . . But we always do our own decorating, except that one time when we went off on holiday, leaving ourselves at the mercy of the colour scheme we thought we'd picked out from those pesky colour cards. . .and spent the next twenty years sleeping in a neapolitan candy ice cream parlour. Undeterred, we plunged into dust bunnies and sugar soap, knuckle-eating sanding blocks, evil hateful extending ladders and paint-rollers on poles.

There must be an easier way. Something brilliant and new.

There probably is, only we are ignorant of the modern world, and only know the way to B&Q

Are you sure about Purple Sage, Peter? Please try to put The Grateful Dead connection out of your mind, and visualise how long we're likely to live with this.

That bxxxxxd Silver Meteor. I hate it. It lacks the single most important characteristic of paint. It sticks to nothing except me, and anything I wish I hadn't touched.

By Wednesday afternoon we had discovered Green, and though Green swiftly discovered a lot of places it should not, we felt we were in sight of the distant goal.

Thankfully, we always cook for about twenty and then invite four people, so that dinner party was still sustaining us with high-grade leftovers.

Friday evening, oh, I was so tired, and somebody left the door to the basement open. A cat came up the stairs. If it had been Milo. . . well, it was Ginger, curious and unperturbed, sniffing at the sticky crushed pine skirting boards, eyeing up the ladders. There was a moment (for which I take full responsibility) when I should have grabbed my paint kettle, and I grabbed for the cat instead.

My God. Alas, how easily things go wrong. . . and in classic style, I suspect it wasn't the accident, it was our frantic attempts to recover the situation. She's on my knee now, wearing an Elizabethan Collar of clear plastic. I hope and believe she's going to be okay, but after we'd got the paint off, the fur fell out of her right inner thigh and her armpit, and she licked the raw places and got herself an infection. Meanwhile, my right hand, savaged with furious determination in the vet's office, swelled up like a balloon, and Peter has interesting puncture scars inside his left elbow.

We'd been planning to go and see the late night show of Enter The Void . We went to see it on Saturday afternoon instead. Not really the right ambience. The trippiness had to struggle to get through the painkillers, far as I was concerned. But a good cult movie, nonetheless.

Trouble is, I've really gone off Crushed Pine.

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