Decorated with Honours.

Don’t get me started on the BLOODY COT.

I’m not one for making light of childbearing, that visceral combination of biological mayhem and physiological improbability. That’s why I’m as serious as a Snap! lyric when I say that pregnancy & childbirth is the equal of…painting & decorating.

I’ve recently spent a good few days painting – except none of those days were good. They were (like any painting day) expensive, tedious, tiring, aggravating, tedious, boring and tedious.

Admittedly, there’s positivity behind the paint: a refreshed nursery is required because a new cub is on its way, all being well. Yay! Well done my spiffing spaff/Mrs Polar Bear’s eggcellent eggs (delete as applicable).

However, apart from adding to the ‘sloth’* , a brush in the hand is worth a kick in the nuts. Indeed, the impact of child gestation and subsequent child evacuation is almost exactly like the impact caused by prepping and painting four moderately-sized walls. Evidence? Let me oblige:

1) Preparation Clothes; muslins; cot; travel system; TENS machine; Bacon Crispies (for us, not the bab): getting ready for parenthood costs time and money. Nursery painting is part of that, but has its own complicated itinerary. Decided on the right colour? Not before a thousand demoralising visits to B&Q. Got the right amount of paint? No you haven’t. You simply haven’t. Got the right paintbrushes? So you think, until you make a solitary brush stroke and realise its shedding faster than a Lib-Dem sheds voters. Painstakingly masking-taped what seems like 87% of the room? Done your ‘cutting in’? I could go on and on. Just like painting.

2) Advice Announce you’re starting a family and you become engulfed by a tsunami of assertively-delivered guidance. It’s the same for painting, when everyone suddenly believes they’re a genetically modified Handy Andy.

3) Unrealistically Eager Beavers “Oh, I actually really enjoyed the birthing experience – it’s beautiful, I felt serene, you don’t really notice the pain…” When I hear this kind of eulogising, a little man inside my head (who’s seen One Born Every Minute countless times, so knows the truth of the matter) screams BOLLOCKS at 1000 decibels. This little man (I call him ‘Alberto’) becomes similarly splenetic when certain people think it’s acceptable to utter the phrase ‘you know what? I really enjoy painting.’ NO YOU DON’T. YOU ABSOLUTELY COCKING DON’T. No-one, in the history of every universe that’s ever existed or ever will exist, could say the following phrase with an ounce of truth in their being:

“Everyone’s out for drinks tonight, you say? Oh, would love to, but I’m actually planning to repaint the cloakroom. For fun.”

Childbirth is amazing, but you wouldn’t do it for hours on end, seven days a week. Uploading pictures of cats to Facebook, yes: childbirth, no. It’s the same for painting, except it can’t even pass itself off as amazing. Therefore, let’s end this ‘Enjoyable Painting’ myth, yeah? Good.

4) Anxiety Delivering babies is stressful, but for men painting a nursery, the pressure is similarly relentless. Carefully guiding an inch of brush along the tiniest margin, doing your damnedest not to encroach onto the paintwork of the accent wall: it’s an act of almost Hitchcockian tension. And just imagine the reaction if your partner finds out you had unwittingly knocked over a tin of paint. IMAGINE.

5) Afterbirth After potentially days of pushing, panting and cursing the inefficacy of contraception, your inspirational partner produces your precious offspring. Just when you think she’s done all the hard work, and you’ve experienced the main feature, you’re forced to stay for the end credits and pop out a placenta.

Weeks before this, after potentially days of brushing, painting and cursing the inefficacy of Wickes Value Brilliant White Matt, you produce a pristine example of decorating perfection. Just when you think you’ve done all the hard work, and you’ve endured the main feature, you’re forced to stay for the end credits and paint the bloody skirting boards.

At least with a placenta you can plant it in the garden, or pan-fry it with shallots. What can you do with skirting boards?

I’m well aware that decorating is the sweet side of the ‘pregnancy/painting’ trade-off: aside from an outside chance of a paint splash in the eye (which, I can attest, is searingly painful), no element of the painting process requires you to have a spinal injection of drugs to reach a finish. Motherhood is the mother of endurance tests. This makes Mrs Polar Bear incredible. Mothers are incredible. Painters aren’t really incredible (no offence, Da Vinci).

Growing and delivering a child is a heroic endeavour – if recolouring rooms makes for a happier heroine, then getting busy with the brush is the least a bloke can do.

Nevertheless – childbirth may well be emotional, but please: let’s not forget that painting is comparably emulsional.

* A ‘sloth’ is the collective term for bears. Who knew? (Google knew).