When she was in her early 50s, my mother decided to take up painting. She joined an art class, bought art supplies and painted some lovely landscapes and rustic urban scenes that still grace the walls of her house.

The Christmas after she took up painting, I arrived home from somewhere, I can’t now remember where. The presents were all under the tree – all except Mammy’s present to me. One of my and my sister’s favourite pastimes in the days leading up to Christmas Eve was to sit by the tree, examining all the carefully wrapped presents with our names on and guess the contents, comparing the size and weight of our respective presents. Mammy explained that she hadn’t put my present under the tree yet, because I would immediately know what it was and the surprise would be ruined. She planned to only put it under the tree in the moments before we unwrapped our presents after tea on Christmas Eve. I had no idea what it might be.

The next day, I went in to Gilroy to see Nana. She made me a mug of coffee and put a plate of biscuits on the coffee table beside the bowl of Quality Street chocolates that was already there. We chatted about this and that. After a while, and seemingly apropos to nothing, she said, “What do you think of it?” “Hmmm?” I said, too busy deciding whether to have another Quality Street or another biscuit. “I don’t think it looks anything like you, do you?” she asked. “Erm, no,” I replied, with genuinely not a clue what she was talking about, but also still too distracted by the chocolate to find out more. And the conversation moved on to other things.

Christmas Eve evening arrived. We ate our tea and then went to light the Christmas candle on the hall table. Daddy lit the candle and the four of us bowed our heads and said a prayer. The moment to open our presents had come. In the middle of tea, Mammy had slipped out to put her present to me under the tree. As soon as I walked into the sitting room and saw it under the tree, I knew that it was a painting of some sort.

We opened our presents one by one, each of us waiting to see what everyone else had received and watching their reactions. The moment came to unwrap my painting from Mammy. I carefully removed the wrapping to reveal…a portrait of ME! Well, sort of a portrait of me. I tried hard not to burst out laughing and one look at Daddy’s and my sister’s faces let me know that they were struggling not to laugh too. But, she’d put so much effort into it and none of us wanted to hurt her feelings. But, God, it was hard.

“I couldn’t get the lips right,” she said. I thought to myself ‘And that’s not all!’. I could see that the lips and been drawn, erased and redrawn many times in pencil, as she tried and failed to get the shape right. My nose was very long and narrow, my eyes strangely slanted and wide-set and my hair sat on top of my head like a helmet. My shoulders were heavy and, although the portrait stopped above my chest, it gave the impression that I had the huge heavy breasts of a seventy year old. “It’s lovely,” I said.

I don’t remember what happened next, but by the next day, Mammy’s portrait of me had turned into a highlight of our Christmas. The first to see it was my uncle Tom, when he arrived out for Christmas Day dinner, and then my uncles and cousins who came out for tea later that evening. Mammy was very quickly in on the joke, realising that this was perhaps not her best work and that the portrait had value of a different kind – it made us all silly with laughter. We discovered the best thing about the portrait was showing it to people with straight faces, pretending that we thought it was brilliant and watching as the cogs moved in their heads as they tried to find something polite to say about it.

The portrait came with me to the UK and, when I met Julian, it came with us to the many houses we lived in over the years. I’d sometimes arrive home late at night to find Julian in bed with the portrait on my pillow, delighted with his little joke. He carried on the tradition started by my own family of showing it to his family and our friends with a straight face and waiting for their reactions.

When we moved onto the boat, there was no room for the portrait, so we put it up in my father-in-law’s loft in Coventry. I imagined it doing a Dorian Grey on me but, I’ve grown older and it continues to not look at all like me! A little over a year ago, my father-in-law downsized to a smaller house and I travelled to the UK to deal with what was left of our stuff up in his loft. There I found the portrait, which I hadn’t seen in years. There was only one place for it – on the wall of the spare room (Lily and Katie’s room) at my father-in-law’s new house.

Lily and I are sleeping in that room at the moment, with Katie relegated to the sofa in the living room. Every time we look up at that portrait we giggle. Who could have guessed that that heartfelt and earnestly created piece of art would have such an unexpected life out in the world.