Listening but apparently not hearing

13st 8lb, despite 7.0 units of alcohol yesterday evening (or because of it, having due regard to its efficacy as a diuretic); 1,366; Fallodon.

Everything is going right, yet I am overwhelmed with dread that I have made a horrible mistake. Specifically, David the painter has finished redecorating a large chunk of my house to his usual high professional standard, and I fear that I have chosen completely the wrong colour.

The dining room looked so scruffy that I felt moved to apologize for its condition the last time I gave a lunch party, explaining that I was about to have it redecorated, and my guests swiftly piled in with their creative ideas for a new colour scheme. I must be terribly suggestible, as I immediately went along with the firm consensus that it should be painted grey rather than the rather insipid primrose yellow it was at the time. So I chose a light grey which looked all right on the colour chart, and still doesn’t look too bad on the staircase, so long as I narrow my eyes and focus mainly on the carpet. But shine some daylight on it, as the windows in the dining room are ever so slightly inclined to do, and it looks like a particularly feeble, washed-out lilac. It would be hard to imagine anything less likely to lift my mood.

I am half tempted to ask David to repaint it right away, but I can tell that he hasn’t really got the time or the inclination, and it doesn’t seem like the best possible use of my limited funds to pay to have it done twice within a week. Maybe it will grow on me, he suggested encouragingly as we heaved an enormous bookcase back into place, which at least had the virtue of covering up almost the whole of one extremely dull wall.

I had a chat with one of my lunch guests on the phone last night, and asked him what on earth had possessed him to suggest painting the place grey. He firmly denied it, asserting that he had definitely favoured a nice, rich red. What’s more, he added that he was sure no-one else had mentioned grey, either.

I wish now that I’d asked him what colour his own dining room is painted. I bet it’s primrose yellow. He’s never invited me round to see it, and now I don’t suppose he ever will.

Sod it. Sometimes I wish I had an aesthetic sense of my own. Or just some sense, full stop.

Things aren’t going too well with the LTCB, either. She has firmly rejected all the suggested pseudonyms I have come up with to replace the foregoing acronym with something punchier, more memorable, amusing and generally reader-friendly. She also took exception to the header I had chosen for my post of 30 April. How the hell was I supposed to know that she was born in Manchester?