Taupe, ecru, beige

My bathroom is going to be replaced from tomorrow. This is particularly exciting as the plumber has been promising to come for several months. This had lead to a rather long period of not really bothering to clean the bathroom properly 'as its going to be gutted soon'. As a result it's been a place of less than welcoming demeanour. I had to go to a DIY shop (and I still feel slightly phobic about these places) to choose complicated things like floor and wall tiles and paint. I’m no interior decorator, but am quite pleased with a colour scheme of marbled white tiles with a hint of ‘granite’ and ‘granite’ floor tiles (non-slip luckily) and ‘Arctic white’ for the walls. It won’t be a warm and cosy room, but it might be a nice, clean room soon. I’m looking forward to waving goodbye to the black mould that has been depressing me for sometime, that even the spray-on sulphuric acid stuff couldn't help with, and the carefully positioned house plant wilted away from.

I'm not sure why 'granite' is a selling point - it doesn't look particularly special. The only thing I can think of worthy of note is its radon emitting properties (forget going to A&E for your suspected broken bone, just hold it over the draining board for a while). However, the paint colours were reassuringly pretentious as always; 'crushed cotton' and 'freyed hessian' giving a whole new dimension to Adrian Mole's sock drawer.

The pretentious colour names remind me of those menus that talk about freshly harvested sea vegetables from under the wild waves of the Atlantic or the rice that is grown in the flood waters of the Himalayan foothills. I used to think prawns on a bed of lettuce was bad enough, but reading these menus is like reading the pompous information notices next to paintings in art galleries; 'Trystan used gouache mixed with mud from the bottom of his Barbour boots and his own pubic hair to create this evocative scene reflecting the enduring power of democracy'.

Perhaps I'm going to the wrong art galleries.