40 St John Street, London EC1

If I tell you that we’ve finally got the decorators in, I don’t want you to go thinking that means the kitchen is built. Why on earth would the kitchen be built? The work on the kitchen was supposed to take four weeks, and so far it has been only ten weeks. So how could it be anything but four or five more weeks until the kitchen is built?

The kitchen, after two and a half months, is not entirely not built. It has a sink, a range, a fridge and some drawers. It has some bits of floor. But it does not have windows or doors, only boarded-up openings until the doors and windows come from the joiners (sometimes putting a pane of glass between four sticks of wood and gluing a handle on it can take months, you know). So you can cook in there, in theory, but you feel like Mrs Goebbels, boiling tinned rations for her doomed babies in the bunker during the last days of the Reich.

So what is being decorated is my study. We thought we’d better do some of the rest of the house while we wait for the kitchen windows, if only to offset the tedium of the long years it will no doubt take to screw four bloody hinges to the wall and hang a pair of bastard french doors on them.

My new study is going to be in the big room on the first floor, which in Victorian times was, I guess, the “posh” reception room. I could never think of a use for it in the past and it has lain fallow for years, storing pictures, bicycles, sledges, garden furniture, and at least two lawnmowers.

But Esther’s done it up all nice for me as a study: “Tunsgate Green” on the walls, “James White” on the paintwork (not to be confused with “Jimmy White”, which is far too pale), and a vast bookcase painted “Vert De Terre”; the fireplace has been patched up and the chimney cleaned; she’s put a rug down to muffle the floorboards, and a swivelling chair in the bay window so that my desk faces into the room instead of out at the street, so I don’t get distracted, and can spend my life working like a dog, so that she doesn’t have to.

With my books now on the shelves, and my fat old dictionary lolling on my dad’s lectern and my cricket bat leaning in the corner, I stand and look at the room and feel an unspeakable thrill at the thought of all the great work I am going to do in there. And then I go downstairs and watch telly.

The glory of the room is in the paint. It is posh paint. It has a depth and tone and richness that I just didn’t know paint could have. Or am I a credulous twat, seduced by rapacious branding? The stuff cost £60 a pot. The decorators called Esther from the paint shop and said, “It’s going to cost £500 for one room, just for the paint, is that OK?”

She said that it was, and then they phoned her twice more to check. And then they called her into the room to check that it was OK one last time, before they cracked the lid on the first pot. It does look great, but if we do the whole house in it Esther will have to get a job, so we’ve been to a trade paint guy in Archway with our Farrow & Ball colours, and he’s going to match them all and do them at half the price.

Will they be as good? Some people tell me that Farrow & Ball paints are so marvellous because they “use more pigment”, whatever in the world that means, and that although the colours will look the same, they won’t be. Can that be possible? Can a Tunsgate Green wall look Tunsgate Green and not be? What is colour? I appreciate that posh paint has a flatter, more traditional, more period-drama drawing room look than the cheap stuff, but surely, if you can match it exactly, then you can match it exactly. I’ve never had a great nose for authenticity. I look at clothes, cars, furniture, food, and find it very hard to tell what is truly good, and what is just having me on. And it can be the same with women, so I went to the Eastside Inn twice, once with Esther, and once with a random flopsy, to see if I could tell the difference.

It wasn’t a random flopsy. It was the original Flopsy, Esther’s little sister Florence, often called Flopsy, who all the time that I was taking Esther out to dinner and passing her off in these pages as a “random flopsy”, was steaming with indignation at the misuse of her name.

So I saved the “bistro” part of Eastside for Esther, and took Flopsy to the “fine dining” room. That would teach her. Fine dining is always a bit of a stress. And it’s always disconcerting when places have both under one roof, as so many do these days. Which is the real and which the fake? Is the “fine dining” bit a bistro with airs and graces, or is the “bistro” just a “fine dining” restaurant without table cloths?

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