Many people have pointed out how minimalist casa az is, which I can understand as there isn’t much`superfluous’ furniture here. But mostly they notice that the walls are bare – this seems to strike people as very strange. Thing is, it isn’t that I want my walls to be bare, but I’ve never been one for putting up any old thing just to fill up wall space or ‘add a bit of colour’ to my rooms. I’ve been in homes where the walls were almost totally covered in pictures and somehow it worked in those places, but it’s just not for me. I always figured that I’d find things I liked poco á poco, that seemed to ‘belong’ somewhere in my home. So getting a new picture is kind of a big deal for me . . .

For ages the only thing I had on any of my walls was this fish mirror in the livingroom that was given to me as a Christmas present about fifteen years ago. I like collecting fish things and love the colours on the mirror frame – it was made in Bristol by a woman who had a whole shop full of ceramic fish stuff she makes (can’t remember her name).

Then a few years later a friend gave me this small cat watercolour he’d painted, which I put up in my bedroom. It was a gift for letting him leave his pretty Siamese girl with me for a week in order to mate her with my Sunny, though in the end the deed was never done because Sunny was just too duh to figure out how to do it.

And that was it for years. Just these two small gifts on my walls. Though I am seriously coveting one of Norberto’s serigraphs (the one in the top right hand corner). When I first saw it at the Christmas market last December I knew it had to go on the wall over my sofa. Well, one day when I can afford it. It’s funny because I never thought that wall looked particularly bare before, but now that I know what ‘belongs’ there it looks like a vast empty space to me.

And then while I was in Tavira I happened into a little shop called Casa das Portas run by a very nice Welsh woman called Jane Gibbin. I’ve always loved photos of doors and windows and her shop was full of framed prints, posters, postcards and bookmarks – all variations of the door and window theme – made from photos she had taken herself in Tavira. And when I saw this picture I thought ‘oooh, that’s mine!’ and that was that. I even knew exactly where it belonged (in the livingroom, above the cat bed). There was a bit of a delay in getting it up because I couldn’t bring it back on the bus with me from Tavira and so Pipocas brought it in her car and I just picked it up from her on Friday when we had lunch together. Anyhow, it looks perfect where it is – like it’s always been there.

What kind of stuff do you have on your walls?