BY the time you are reading this the election will be over and we will be able to turn on the television again without fear of being bored to death by party political broadcasts or blinded by the flashing teeth of many a politician practising sincerity. Babies will be able to be taken out without fear of being kissed by a stranger and all those glaring day-glo posters disfiguring our beautiful countryside can be taken down and stored in somebody's shed until next time.

What a relief.

I came home the other Friday night to discover that someone had painted the downstairs lavatory walls lilac. This was a considerable shock as in the morning when I left they had been white, a restful non-colour which suits the mood and purpose of the room.

Within the next few days we had bottle green draped voile curtains in there too and a few artfully arranged pottery fish to add to the ambience which I'm told is the Mediterranean style and all the rage. Well quite frankly I'm not impressed. As one of my bad habits, and I admit to a few, is reading in the loo I'm not entirely sure I want to relax with my latest detective novel in a room which now reminds me of a down town Italian bistro only minus the candles stuck in Chianti bottles.

Having got used to the upstairs loo being done out in what I have dubbed Mexican bordello style, orange red walls and matching carpet, I had rather hoped my refuge on the ground floor could remain fairly utilarian. It only lacked a bookcase as far as I was concerned.

This is the problem with sharing a house with your daughter and her family. She has very definite ideas about interior decoration and they include the sure and certain knowledge that I'm totally out of touch with anything approaching a modern trend.

Actually I'll probably get in trouble for calling the loo lilac because I don't think the paint was called lilac at all. It was something like Rodeo sunset, whatever that means. They've all got funny names now, so that the people who use them can bathe in the warm glow of the paint manufacturer's bid to make yellow more interesting by calling it Moonlight over Mesopotamia or orange not sounding like orange because it's now called Tuscany Sunrise and when you're sitting in your room on a dark cold rainy October night it can put you in mind of a balmy summer's evening overlooking the Tuscan hills. Or would, if you were brain dead.

It started with terracotta, that indeterminate colour which varies between red and orange but never looks much like the pots. I'm sure interior decorators leapt on it because it can cover greasy little finger marks with just one coat and instantly transform your previously magnolia walls into something quite different. If you really want to live in a potting shed that is. Some people went right over the top with terracotta, so you found yourself in a terracotta walled room with a terracotta carpet and sofa, chairs and curtains to match. After a couple of glasses of vino you were lucky to be able to find the door without trying to walk up the walls.

It does remind me of when my father brought home a job lot of distemper (in those days you had a choice of distemper or whitewash and distemper was slightly more up market). It was a rather peculiar shade of pink and when he started painting my mother pointed out that it was exactly the same shade as my grandmother's corsets. Which it was.

My father said in that case he'd paint her room with it and she could stand against the wall and disappear, a joke which didn't go down well, but then they didn't get on.

His most famous anti-gran remark was, according to my mother, when they were listening to a radio play about King Charles the Second, who was supposed to have said on his death bed 'Don't let poor Nellie starve', a reference to his mistress Nell Gwynne. My father said loudly 'I would'. Nellie was my grandmother's name.

But I digress as usual.

I'm getting used to the lilac loo now, oops, sorry, the Rodeo sunset after a light shower of rain room. It probably won't last, because I'm sure by next year Mediterranean will be out and something will have replaced it. Australian outback perhaps? Can we look forward to sandy yellow paint and replicas of Ayres Rock on the cistern? I hope not, Ayres Rock looks very terracotta to me.

I've never had very much luck with home decoration in the houses I've moved in to.

The first house we owned was a rather ordinary semi except the previous owner had either worked for a tile company and had light fingers or got a big discount.

The kitchen, bathroom, front and back porch and even the larder were all tiled in small pale blue tiles from floor to ceiling. It was like living in a pale blue public lavatory even if it was a doddle to clean.

The next house had a variety of flock wallpaper which acted like Velcro so that you stuck to it and left samples of your clothing on the walls. It also had the most bilious, and brand new, green carpets throughout the entire house and any woman knows that it takes a very tough woman indeed to persuade a husband that you need to get rid of brand new carpets which still have fluff coming off them just because you don't like the colour.

I was not that woman and our decorations had to be made to match them. I got used to asking 'what goes with carpets the colour green sick?' in wallpaper shops.

Another house had every room done in a different garish wallpaper, so that if you left doors open the clash was enough to send you running for sunglasses. The main bedroom, I seem to remember, had orange, purple and lime green leaves with what appeared to be small dead bright pink squirrels nesting up mustard yellow tree trunks on it.

The only saving grace was that all the paper was the sort which can be ripped off in one whole piece, leaving a plain backing paper on the wall.

We gave the children, who had previously been nagged rigid for picking at even a tiny piece of loose wallpaper, permission to run riot all around the house tearing off all the paper.

It really was a pity that we were halfway through the hall and the kitchen when the new neighbours called to welcome us to the area.

I don't think they ever really recovered from the sight of three children and two adults wrenching off the wall coverings, standing knee-deep in torn paper and laughing manically, watched by a Golden retriever and four interested cats

It may have been a forerunner of Changing Rooms but I'm afraid nobody was quite ready for it in 1979.