THERE are many things in life I am not very keen on – smoking, piccalilli and getting bacon rind stuck between my teeth are near the top of the list.

But I would light up a tab and eat raw bacon smothered in the yellow peril if it meant I never have to decorate again.

Decorating is the bane of my life, as evidenced by the fact that one of the jobs Mrs Hextol arranged for me to do to stop me being bored when I retired two years ago was decorating the kitchen.

Two years on, the tin of emulsion for the kitchen remains unopened, gathering dust as I find excuse after excuse for not wielding the paint brush.

It’s only the fact that I am way too mean to hire a professional decorator that keeps me constantly putting off donning the painting clobber and hunting out the green canvas bag that contains the paraphernalia associated with applying emulsion to walls.

Having to decorate in tandem with Mrs Hextol is not easy, as she is the only person I know who will complain about the mess I am making when stripping wallpaper.

But I was marginally better than the mother-in-law and her sister, who decided to lend a hand with the wallpaper stripping at one house, and had made great inroads until I gently pointed out they were enthusiastically scraping off the paper Mrs Hextol and her dad had applied with great difficulty just the day before.

Painting is such a messy business, and despite wrapping every exposed surface in a cocoon of old bedsheets, polythene and dust sheets, almost as much emulsion ends up on the carpet as there is on the wall.

And that is only a fraction of the amount that adheres to my clothes, hair, ears and arms.

I seem to be a paint magnet, who only has to walk into a room which has been painted any time over the past month to end up liberally daubed.

My emulsioning suffers from the fact that Mrs Hextol is a self-appointed clerk of works, who chips in with helpful comments such as “You’ve missed a bit”, “ Is this just the first coat?” and “I don’t like this colour now it’s on – you’ll have to do it again.”

Almost as bad as the painting is the cleaning up afterwards, where those brushes and rollers that would hardly apply any paint to the walls suddenly start spouting gallons of the stuff all over the kitchen when you try to rinse them under the tap.

And how is it is that no matter how assiduously I attempt to clean up afterwards, Mrs Hextol still finds globules of brilliant white hanging from the taps, curtains and washing up bowl which definitely were not there when I finished operations.

While I am inestimably bad at emulsioning, I am even worse at applying wallpaper, which is an activity well beyond my modest capabilities.

I can’t match patterns, cut the pieces too long, tear it when attempting to hang it, and often stand on the trailing length of pasted vinyl.

Mrs Hextol once entrusted me with hanging a single length of embossed paper on the landing, a task which she reasoned would have been well within the compass of an orangutan.

She came to check on me an hour later, and discovered I had tried to fix the slithery stuff to the wall with such vigour I had completely flattened the raised pattern.

The expensive lincrusta was as flat as a sheet of lining paper and I narrowly escaped being batted with the little brush Mrs Hextol uses when she is hanging paper.

She, of course, is a paper hanger of extraordinary ability who could paper a jelly if the mood took her. Armed with a scalpel, scissors, a damp cloth and her favourite batting brush, she transforms a piece of wet paper into a thing of beauty in a matter of moments, with a snip and a twiddle there, a slash here and a bit of jiggery pokery.

My sole function is the application of the wallpaper paste and the transfer of the pasted strips of Vymura from the pasting table to Mrs Hextol, perched on top of the stepladder.

I am not very good at that either, attracting icy comments such as: “You’ve pasted the wrong side”,”You’ve given it to me upside down” or “Are you sure you could spare the paste on this one? It’s just about bone dry.”