We’d been trying for ages to sell both my place and Jane’s old place down in Cambridgeshire, but the down-turn in the market meant that houses just weren’t selling. So eventually we decided to bite the bullet, put both our properties on the rental market and rent a bigger property with the proceeds.

And that’s how it’s worked out. Kind of. We ended up renting a great place just south of King’s Lynn, and Jane’s place has been rented out for ages, but my place has only just gone on the market. It’s taken me this long to get it completely decorated and repaired up to a standard that’s rentable. So basically we’ve been losing money on it hand over fist while it sat empty. But there’s no way on Earth I would have been able to properly repair, paint and decorate the place while we were living in it. There was barely room to swing a cat, and there are laws against swinging cats coated in marigold emulsion.

Having a nice new house to prepare for the baby’s arrival in has been great. Renting means that everything DIY-wise is basically done for us. The downside of that is that we haven’t had the traditional pleasure of painting and decorating the nursery in preparation for the baby’s arrival.

So we decided in order to stop the baby’s room being a totally nondescript beige box, we’d commission an artist to produce a painting to liven up the room. We knew exactly the person for the job.

I’ve been friends with Sophie Green for a few years now. I could  tell you just how highly I value our friendship, but I paid money for this painting so I’d better keep this on a professional art-buyer level (and not the soppy blubbing fool level).

Her recent work has included creating illustrations for children’s stories, and she has a great eye for the kind of bright bold designs that children love. Some of her recent art work has also involved repeated crowds of animals. We wanted something like that for Junior’s room. But with tigers.

Someday I’ll explain the tiger thing.

The painting came today, we adore it. I just love the fact that my son will grow up knowing this picture, and it’s not going to live in the nursery forever, it’s too good for that!

You can see more of Sophie’s work at sophie-green.com.