Workmen could dual-coat the Forth Bridge in its Transguard TG168 red paint in less time than it takes me to decide on a tone for my spare loo's walls. I can't even get my head around Crown's online trend ranges - Addition, Slow and the aptly named Tension - instead slinking off towards the safe neutrality of Dulux's old chestnut range. Say colour and I think Edna Everage, or Sven-Goran's ex-missus Nancy - although she's no Olio-painting, even if she does drip gloss. But visions of pastels don't decorate my inner eyelids, ever. My only brush with pricey pigment was ill-fated. As the new custodian of a cupboard within a grand Regency terrace, I resisted Jocasta Innes's 80s exhortations to stipple, stencil and rag roll for England, deciding to go all plain Jane Austen in Georgian shades. I tried Dead Salmon. Tested Elephant's Breath. Splashed out on Otter Snot and Cadaver (I may have misheard the names). Three coats later, and all "heritaged" out, I reverted to the same bosh-it-on brilliant white that always works, well ... brilliantly.
My relationship with paints may be fraught, and ultimately cowardly, but wallpaper is something I'll truly never get the hang of. The problem stems from childhood, when I was subjected to poncey primrose marble effect from BHS, with a border of Woolies' woolly sheep. Back then, free makeovers from Changing Room's Laurence Llewellyn-Overblown were still decades away, so I pestered my parents into Edinburgh's leading interior design emporium.
Beyond the Marimekko abstracts and the Paco Rabanne metallic bile and puce stripes lurked the grooviest design imaginable. Yes, it was my heroes, bowlerhatted dandy John Steed and catsuit-clad babe Emma Peel of The Avengers, in two-dimensional form - tastefully silhouetted black on cream, in fact. Faster than Emma could karate-chop a mass-murderer masquerading as a vicar, I pounced on this most sophisticated of samples ... but it was not to be. Beating the Rolling Stones to the realisation by a whole year, I was about to learn that, in life, you can't always get what you want.
"It's two guineas a roll by special order from London, Modom" sneered a prissy paper-peddler to my mother. Dad was incredulous. "You'll pick something from this ... and like it," he spluttered, pointing to a budget range from a manufacturer in Kettering, Kirkcaldy or some other unfashionable hovel. Faced with the stark choice between Paddington Bear, Songbirds of Britain (which is to say larks, nightingales and thrushes as opposed to Cilla, Dusty and Lulu) and Thunderbirds Are Go, I agreed to the latter, then cried all the way home.
I suffered recurrent nightmares in which the neighbourhood bully, uncovering my camp puppet shame, would suffocate me in rolls of the stuff, like an Egyptian Mummy's boy. Attempts to customise the offending article with magic markers and my sister's Rimmel lippy condemned me to the naughty step. My childhood tormentors - Lady Penelope, Parker and Scott Tracy - are directly responsible for my adult phobias of botoxed blondes, Noel Gallagher and football pundit Alan Hanson. After a lengthy strop - a reaction to naff decor choices nowadays identified as Kelly Hoppen-mad syndrome - I was upgraded to a bedroom newly vacated by my sister. Inheriting this shrine to Donny Osmond on Barbie and Ken pink washable, I rebelled. This simply wasn't acceptable for Scotland's foremost glamrocker-inwaiting. I imagined my den as a rad mix of Ziggy Stardust glitter and Bryan Ferry's Roxy in silver epoxy. Wrong! Returning from a Gdawful school trip to Gdansk, my parents' latest "nice surprise" awaited: a "with it" opalescent Anaglypta. That's paintable textured wallpaper, to those of you who've never had the pleasure. And yes, I did say paintable.
I can't honestly blame the wallpaper (although I wish I could), but a few days later I was struck down with life-threatening peritonitis. In my feverish condition, I hallucinated that the pattern was alive. Crawling with hitherto unnoticed demons, it was the sort of acid hell that Timothy Leary was paying good money to experience at the time. Waiting for an ambulance, I drifted in and out of consciousness. "There must be something we can do," my mother sobbed hysterically. Somehow I managed to invoke the inspired exit line uttered by Oscar Wilde as he breathed his last in a tacky Parisian hotel: "Either that wallpaper goes or I do," I croaked. By the time I got out of hospital, it had, replaced by tried and trusted white emulsion, my Bowie posters neatly Blu-Tacked above the bed.
Keith Barker-Main
IMAGE: www.sandersdecorating.com
