Claire Black: I’ve eaten takeaways with a clear conscience three nights in a row. Man, I know how to live’

“SO WHAT have you been up to?” What do you mean? What are you trying to say? Who saw me? What do you think I’ve been up to?

Oh, and while we’re at it with the questions: why is it that when your girl or boyfriend/civil partner/spouse/squeeze (apologies for the digression, but what is a non-embarrassing word for that person?) is away, people feel compelled to ask that particular question? Not how you’ve been, or where you’ve been or even who you’ve been with, but what you’ve been up to?

R has been away. For ten days. Consequently I have been asked by close friends and passing acquaintances alike to explain what I’ve been doing that I shouldn’t have been doing. That’s what the question means, doesn’t it? It implies that left unsupervised for a whole week and a half I will have, of course, cut loose, thrown off the shackles of my domestic life and gone wild. But doing what? What is it that you’re supposed to get up to?

“I’ve sold the house and bought a camper van for us to live in instead. I think R will be secretly pleased.” “I’ve decided to give up my job and retrain as a belly dancer. It’s what I’ve always wanted.”

“I’ve got hitched. It’s fast, I know. I think R may be a little shocked, but I’ll be on honeymoon when she gets back so not to worry.”

Is that the kind of thing that people are hoping for?

Then what a failure I am. What a ridiculous disappointment. Up to? Up to? I tell you what I’ve been up to – I’ve been painting the kitchen.

That’s right. You heard me. I went postal with the grease-free, pure brilliant white. Matt, naturally. And I threw caution to the wind by filling the cracks in the grout. And, if you really want the truth, as in the whole-and-nothing-but unexpurgated version, I bought a heat gun for stripping the paint from the window, the one with so much old gloss on it it’s more of an archaeological dig than a paint-stripping exercise. I got up to so much with that I set the fire alarm off. Twice.

Actually, I feel better for confessing. I hold my hands up to wanton decorating, utterly reckless consumption of DIY products and flagrant use of turpentine. And truth be told, there is an element of transgression in my decorating activities because R loathes B&Q (I’ve been there four times in the ten days, and I’m on first-name terms with the man who sold me that heat gun – Hello Brian). I’ve eaten takeaways with a clear conscience three nights in a row. Man, I know how to live.

What do you get up to? I asked my friend Alison. “I get the remote control to myself which means I can watch back-to-back CSI while sitting on the sofa filing the dry skin off my feet. I’m not allowed to do that when (Name Withheld for the sake of marital harmony) is at home.”

What do you get up to? I asked my friend Zoe. “I stay up far too late watching box sets, drinking tea and eating biscuits in bed.”

What do you get up to? I asked my friend Joe. “I never make the bed. I leave my clothes on the floor. I eat dinner in front of the telly.”

Crazy rule breakers. Reckless transgressors. Failures the lot of us.