Splashing back

MY BOYFRIEND is watching Liverpool while pretending to flick through a stack of interior design magazines, writes Róisín Ingle

Approximately two centuries after we first applied for planning permission - we did it twice just to be sure to be sure - and decades after everyone else has finished their extensions using SSIA funds which of course we "forgot" to save, we are, as they say, extending.

I remember the days when we used to have meaningful conversations about art and French cinema. Okay, well, about Make Me A Supermodel, US but you know what I mean. Now it's all "I mean, that's the thing, can you have wooden floors and wooden work surfaces or would that feel like living on a boat or, worse, in a sauna. I hate saunas, anyway. I mean, what is the point of sitting in a steamy wooden room practically naked, etc etc." I steer him gently towards work surfaces. We urgently need ideas.

Nobody tells you about work surfaces and the many, many types of surfaces that exist until you are suddenly having to decide between melamine and granite and moulded plastic.

Our practical, sensible architect gives us beautiful design books, urges us to decide on carpets, floors and radiators but we've discovered we are about as good at deciding on these things as Sarah Palin is at keeping her daughter at home on the (shooting) range.

We haven't yet plucked up the courage to tell her we would really much rather she just decided it all herself. Could we pay her slightly more to do that? Something small out of our ever-decreasing budget? I'm sure her choices would be much better than ours.

He doesn't actually have much time for work surfaces, which is infuriating, but my boyfriend is mad for the splashbacks. Every time we have a meeting with the architects, when we are trying to decide between raft foundations and strip foundations, he pipes up about the thing that is number one on his list of priorities. That and shelves. Even I know splashbacks and shelves aren't as important as foundations. Exhausting, it is. In the middle of a chat about stoves versus open fires (eco blah heat loss blah) I toss in a bit of a curve ball.

"So anyway," I say. "I'm thinking of going back to writing my column."

"What?" he says, still flicking through Credit Crunch Interiors. "But you can't."

"Why not?" I say as if going back to my column was the most logical thing in the world.

Over the past eight years, I've noticed that when he wants to make a very important point my boyfriend speaks in threes. Suddenly, I sense a classic one, two, three coming on. My intuition is as sharp as ever.

"Number one," he says, "you wrote a whole column six months ago saying you were fed up and that you wanted to go 'looking out, instead of looking in', whatever that meant." I say nothing, just surreptitiously flick channels to Grand Designs. Kevin McCloud is oddly attractive, especially when talking about delays in the arrival of hand-carved glass from Italy, for some reason.

"Number two," he says, "you were supposed to stop writing about yourself so that you could concentrate on more creative writing and getting fit. How are those two life goals going, by the way?" This I don't bother answering. It's rhetorical.

"Number three," he says. "Number three, you said you were stopping out of respect for me, that you didn't want to be writing about our lives in a national magazine, you said you loved me too much to do that."

Yeeessss. I can't quite remember saying that bit. But I'm sure I meant it. It's not as though I like going back on my word, I just seem to have loads left to say and - ah, I know! This is when I try to persuade him the column actually helped our relationship. When I gave it up, one reader sent me an e-mail to the effect that he thought my writing gave us a chance to work out our relationship issues. So I try that. "Thing is, writing the column, I've realised it gave us a chance to tease out our issues. It was therapeutic and I miss it," I say.

He narrows his eyes, à la Larry David, and I am forced to concede that it probably wasn't therapeutic for him to go into work aware that his colleagues knew the intimate details of his latest domestic travail. "But at least I never wrote about your Embarrassing Medical Condition," I counter. "That's true," he sighs. "I'll give you that." He is kind and he loves me and so eventually he bestows a qualified blessing. "Just don't write about my mother as though she is just a bleach-obsessed Protestant, and don't keep going on about me as though I am always cleaning or cooking. We have lots of other interests," he says.

When he leaves the room to dust shelves and whip up a quick rhubarb crumble, I phone the mother-in-law- in-waiting, Iris, in Portadown where sales of The Irish Times have diminished by one since I did my grand departure bit.

"I'm thinking of writing my column again," I say, testing the waters north of the Border. Iris gives a big Protestant cheer and rushes out to buy a six-pack of celebratory bleach. Which kind of clinches it for me, to be honest.

PS

READING. . . Eat Pray LoveElizabeth Gilbert's beautifully written journey of self-discovery and pizza-eating. I'm also enjoying A Dance in Time, the new novel by Orna Ross. Brings me back to the days when I had a guilty crush on WB Yeats.

COMING DOWN WITH. . . Fringe Festival mania. Top tips include Etiquette, DYT's We're Not Realand the Antics Rogue Show. Have your say on Fiona McCann's new blog On The Fringe. www.irishtimes.com/blogs/onthefringe

ON THE BUSESMy friend JJ has asked me to give a pat on the back to a member of Dublin Bus staff. Negotiating the city-centre when you're blind can be tricky, so he was delighted when recently the driver of the number 33 bus parked patiently by the curb on O'Connell Street and waited for him. "She didn't even know whether I needed the bus but I did, as it turned out," he said. While he was on, JJ told me about the garden fete that's happening in Clonturk House, opposite St Patrick's College, in Drumcondra, Dublin 9, tomorrow from 1-6pm. JJ lives there with a group of blind men and the fete will help raise money to improve facilities for residents. Admission is free. Expect cakes, craic and a wheel of fortune. www.clonturkhouse.com