"Come on," he shouts, just like he did when I was in childbirth, "last push now"

SUNDAY, 5pm, and after a five-year break from painting, I’m resurrecting my old studio. It’s a long way from Picasso’s atelier on the Riviera but it will do, like it always did, the job.

“It’s freezing up here,” my husband says, shivering at the top of the stairs.

“Yes,” I pant, hot as can be in my old blue boiler-suit, “the thing about studios is to have them just small and cold enough to concentrate the mind and stop visitors from hanging about in them.”