The post-war ideal home

I've been decorating. Me! All butch, up a ladder with a paintbrush and everything.

It's October and this project is starting to come to an end. British vegetables are becoming harder to get hold of as winter sets in and I really, really can't face doing what I did last winter, with a subsistence diet of cabbage and leftovers.

Also, I want to have people over for Christmas and not present them with minced 'beef' made of 1/3 mince, 1/3 finely chopped mushrooms and 1/3 porridge oats soaked in gravy. Although, it must be said, nobody has ever noticed that they're getting that instead of 100% minced beef; and people seemed to like my mashed potatoes made with milk rather than butter.

This all means that post-war life beckons, just as Britain's government starts to unpick the last parts of the Post-War Consensus of Beveridge and Keynes. And, to do it right (and skip the whole people-almost-starved, bread-and-potatoes-rationed, American Loan 1947 experience) I've taken my previously functional, whitewash-and-woodchip living room and spent a week turning it into something the householder of the 1950s would've been proud of. Very proud, actually, given the 42" plasma TV, but we'll leave that aside.

So here it is. I present the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition winning room for 1955 (with 1963 unaccountably appearing on the TV):



Meanwhile, I had a decorator in to do the front room. And because I'm contrary, that's becoming a pre-war, 1930s library-cum-dining room. It's finished, but there's nothing to show until all 10,000-or-so books have been moved into it.

Watch this space.