We’ve been neglecting the campervan a bit of late; the last few months have flown in an endless flurry of jubilee street parties and Olympic fever (not really, but it does explain the rest of the story).

One of the final jobs left in the campervan was to paint the inside back door in the bathroom white. But on our return from the UK a couple of weeks ago, where we’d been surrounded by a sea of patriotic memorabilia, this dull, wooden panel suddenly became a canvas of possibility. What are we doing painting it white?! Surely it is crying out for a union flag!

And while I’ve probably missed the boat in terms of celebrating this year’s fantastic Great British events, it still seemed a timely opportunity to add a little (more) red, white and blue to our now very colourful campervan.

Paul painted a couple of white undercoats on first, and we went to Bunnings to colour match the blue with that of the curtains, so it didn’t clash too much.

I marked out the flag with what Bunnings promised was the best painter’s masking tape available, copying the original from Wikipedia. It’s a pattern that often features in my meeting doodles but I’ve clearly never looked at it closely before because I didn’t even realise it’s not symmetrical. So it was a bit fiddlier than I thought, making sure the wide and narrow bits were in the right place. (n.b. the hole in the middle is deliberate – it’s where the door handle goes.)

Then it was just a case of painting the red and blue in the right spots, and praying that the masking tape would survive three coats of paint.

It didn’t… quite. I waited until everything had dried and pulled the tape off very gingerly, but it had bled through on most of the lines. Still, we think it can pass for a vintage look, and when you stand back in the van, it’s not too obvious.