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First rule of decorating

For some of this week, Lynne has been at a conference in Swansea discussing child abuse and because I wouldn't like to think of her having a miserable time while I'm enjoying myself, I've spent the time painting the kitchen.

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This means that when she returns and moans to me about the depressing state of child protection in this country, I can say 'That's nothing, I've been decorating', which I think counts as a trump card in the misery stakes and will shut her up.

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And please don't say, 'What about the sense of satisfaction you feel when you stand back and see your freshly-painted wall?' because what I mainly see are missed bits and splodges on the floor and, this time, quite a large spider I had accidentally rollered.

Decorating is the sort of thing I can only do when I'm on my own because I tend to go slightly bonkers when doing practical tasks – the children still remember when I couldn't get the lawnmower to behave reasonably and ended up storming off the lawn while shouting at the mower, which, in my deranged state, I thought was deliberately sabotaging me: 'OK, do it yourself then, clever clogs!'

Actually, this time I remained far calmer than usual, mainly because I discovered a new rule of decorating, which is 'Don't use too much Polyfilla and don't bother with sandpaper at all'.

This is because a perfectly-finished wall is a very dull thing whereas pock-marked, irregular plaster tells you the history of the house; failed attempts at shelf building, family differences involving heavy objects, quaint outdated domestic appliances like wall-mounted tin openers – it's all there.

And if it emerged that your house was once occupied by, say, one of the Beatles and you had obliterated all traces of his time there by over-zealous decorating, well I wouldn't like to be you trying to explain yourself to the man from the National Trust.

Naturally, because this is the column that puts the reader first, you are welcome to try and use this excuse yourself, although obviously if there's any resultant violence, you're on your own, son.

Risky business of short forms

I find abbreviations difficult, which would be the reason I'm no good at texting if the real reason I'm no good at texting wasn't that I've got rebellious fingertips and never learned the alphabet properly – am I the only person who thinks that Q should be near the end of the alphabet and is constantly surprised to find it in the late-middle section instead? Actually, in the interests of maintaining my dignity, don't answer that.

However, texting is one of the few areas where abbreviations are justified; the others being telegrams, which went out before most people were born, and voluble holiday postcards, which may also be a lost art.

But saving a few letters is in most cases completely unnecessary; the internet and emails are bottomless wells and paper rationing ended decades ago. Now there's no practical obstacle to spelling things out in full, which should be done because otherwise you keep coming across ugly words you can't say, like Utd and Cllr, and it spoils the flow.

Also abbreviations can constitute a bogus claim to familiarity ("So I told the MD..."). I understand (although I may be wrong because one of my proudest boasts is that I know nothing at all about the Royal Family) that the only people who called the late Princess of Wales 'Di' were members of the press and readers bludgeoned by 130-point headlines into thinking that was her name. The princess herself, as an aristocrat, would have regarded anybody using her abbreviated name as terribly common.

And, er, I think that's all I've got against abbreviations and it's not much is it? Sometimes I wish I could get worked up about things which annoy me, not because it might help me write angry, stimulating columns (I've given up on that) but because I think somebody should stand up for things you need to be mildly unhinged to care about, such as misplaced apostrophes or split infinitives.

But actually the only abbreviation exercising me at the moment is the use of 'mic' to indicate microphone. This is another abbreviation which can't be allowed because it can't be said without taking liberties with the relationship between spelling and pronunciation, which I think is why the Chemic Tavern last week advertised an Open Mike night.

This caused quite a stir because many customers were expecting a ground-breaking surgical procedure show involving blood and scalpels and a man called Mike. How disappointed they were to find it was just another non-violent music and comedy evening.