WHEN your wife books a week off work, tells you she wants us to go upstairs and spend the whole of it together, and suggests Googling ‘ideas for the bedroom’, you could be excused for thinking your luck is in, writes GRAHAM CARTER.

In fact, it almost certainly means your luck is out, as I have been discovering to my cost, during the last week.

It is now also clear that all those brownie points I accumulated during all that shed building, concreting and other work in the garden last summer have been cashed in, and the time has come for a new project: decorating the bedroom.

When my wife is in this sort of mood, I have learned that it is best not to cross her.

There is no use arguing that it is barely 20 years since the bedroom was last decorated, so it doesn’t need doing again.

Nor does she subscribe to my obviously logical view about there being no point spending all that time on something that only me and her ever get to see, and even then we will have our eyes closed, almost all the time we are in there.

However, I have to say that when it comes to decorating, I am probably luckier than most husbands because I am officially exempt from the job around the house that I loathe most of all, which is painting.

I would walk 500 miles to avoid painting your door.

I never pick up a brush in our house because my wife, for some reason, actually enjoys it, even though she gets almost as much on her face and in her hair as on the walls and doors.

But it isn’t just about the painting. The fun has gone out of the rest of the decorating lark, too.

It was different when we were younger, buying our first home, moving up the property ladder, fitting out the new babies’ bedrooms and converting them for teenagers and then young adults.

And in those days decorating was also much less of a strain on my poor aching body.

Whereas I used to be up and down that stepladder like a whippet, now it has become a real challenge.

There is also that thing about the walls that never used to be a problem: they go all the way down to the floor.

Now when I bend down to the bottom of the wall, it’s hard to tell whether the creaking sound I can hear is coming from the floorboards or my knees.

But of course the getting down there is not the worst of it, because it’s the trying to get up again that gets you.

As you grow older and gravity seems to have turned against you, however, it is wise to remember that there are always compensations.

When we were young, we did DIY and decorating out of necessity.

We could only afford a house that needed decorating, and we could only afford decorating if we did it ourselves.

Even then we had to buy the cheapest materials and tools, and even when it was all finished, the carpets and furniture we put in the room were chosen not according to what we really wanted, but how much money we had left.

Now the joy of decorating is not in the doing, but in the finishing.

The luxury of being able to choose the wardrobe we want to finish off the job is matched only by the pleasure of going shopping for the finishing touches with the woman who has been cracking the whip in our bedroom all week.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.