COMMENT: A kind of madness descends upon us all

It starts, as these things always do, with a notion. “Sure, we might as well.” "It’s good to have a deadline." Harmless. Sensible, even. However, when you find yourself standing in your hallway at 9pm on a Tuesday evening, attempting to assemble something that may or may not be scaffolding, in order to paint a ceiling that, until very recently, you had no strong feelings about: this is usually the point where you begin to question your life choices. Because what begins as “we’ll just have the family back; totally lowkey” has a remarkable ability to turn into something that’s not at all lowkey. This phenomena is not immediately apparent and like all the best disasters, spiralling is key.

You paint one wall, for instance. A quick win. Unfortunately, this has the unintended effect of making the rest of the house look neglected. The contrast is unsettling. You hadn’t noticed it before. Now you cannot unsee it. And so, naturally, you keep going. At this point, I begin to understand how things like the recent fuel protests get out of hand, it’s escalated into something nobody can rein back in. You are no longer in charge of the situation. The situation is in charge of you.

Furniture begins to arrive in coffin size boxes, accompanied by instructions that appear to have been translated from Swedish into English via Morse code. You approach them with an Allen key and confidence. This fades quickly.

There is also, inevitably, a phase where you decide to power-wash absolutely everything. That leads us to the garden. The garden is where things take a turn. There is a brief but intense period when walking around your local garden centre when otherwise rational adults become convinced they are capable of producing something that would put Dermot Gavin under pressure. Flowerbeds are planted with a level of optimism that is not supported by previous results.

Hanging baskets appear. Nobody remembers buying them, but there they are, contributing meaningfully to the overall sense of escalation. Trips to the garden centre become less of an outing and more of a reflex. You go in for “a few bits” and come out with compost, some plants that requires a Latin degree to prounounce, and something described vaguely as “ground cover,” which sounds reassuring without being especially informative. And all of this, every last frantic, paint-splattered, soil-covered bit of it is for the best group of people in your life who have already seen your house at its worst and thought nothing of it.

The child at the centre of it all could not care less about the finish on the skirting boards. They are focused on the day itself their readings and prayers, the excitement, and, if we’re being honest, the envelope situation. As parents, its not perfection that drives this, exactly. Its wanting to create a core memory for the people you love. And once that spiralling thought takes hold everything starts to matter. The wall. The garden. The bit of fence no one was ever going to look at until you pointed it out to yourself.

So we do what we always do We overdo it. We repaint perfectly good ceilings at 9pm on a Tuesday. We plant things we won’t water. We fix problems that did not exist until we noticed them. Because when it comes down to it, Communion season doesn’t reveal the house: it reveals the parent.

The house will be full. The kettle will be on. Someone will comment on the weather. Someone else will say the child has grown.

And for a few hours, everything will feel exactly as it should. After that, the paint tins go back to the shed. The weeds encroach those dazzling borders. The hanging baskets quietly give up.

And we’re left, every year, with the same question. What came over us?

Until the next one!