My dad climbed a ladder armed with some string and a pencil and marked out a three-stripe border that swirled around the kitchen ceiling of our new home. It was the 1970s and the sale of our modest London home enabled my parents to buy a much bigger house and garden in Edinburgh. There were four of us children under the age of eight. We were the first family to move into our road and we were English. Our house had belonged to two elderly sisters and the entire house was painted in two colours: a drab green and a dull pinkish colour. Dad set about a transformation more in keeping with the times using left over paint from previous projects. There was only enough orange paint for a thin coat on the ceiling. I don’t remember exactly what colours the original three stripes were, browns and beige I imagine.

Like many family kitchens ours was the focus of our home with the aga at the heart of it. This was where the cooking was done, where we ate and where we did our homework. In the winter it was the only warm room in the house, as although we had central heating it was very rarely used.  When my parents chipped away the plaster from the wall adjoining our neighbours to make a feature brick wall and installed the aga they didn’t really consider that they were removing the sound-proofing between our two kitchens. We realized this belatedly when a family moved next door…

The three-stripe border begins at the ceiling next to the aga wall, it  curls and swoops across the length of the three remaining walls linking ceiling to wall: up and around, over the corner by the door to the window wall where it marks out a plinth-like pattern above the window frame and  performs a tight loop around the central spotlight above the sink, finally coming to rest in a point above the kitchen cupboard where the herbs and glasses are.

Once, during supper, my sister’s friend looked up and said: “Your ceiling is scruffy.” From that moment on we were united as siblings.: the ceiling was ours, we liked it that way. What had been intended as a temporary bit of fun became a permanent feature. Over the years the kitchen ceiling was repainted several times. The stripes changed colour gradually until they reached their present incarnation: stripes of mushroom colours, milky coffee, praline around a muted peach ceiling. Now even the grandchildren think the swirly ceiling is a necessary part of the kitchen in my family home.