The family portrait was painted by the British artist Catherine MacDiarmid in 2013.  The family members are Elizabeth Munro, Nigel Rapport, Callum Munro and Emilie Rapport Munro. Catherine MacDiarmid was asked to paint all four family members but to preserve the integrity of each person, each body (Hogarth has a similar painting of the heads of his servants). So: four representations in the one plane of the canvas but not necessarily integrated or coherent in any other way. A juxtaposition and not a blurring of identities. The painting is an icon of home for me. When I was 7 or 8 my parents arranged for a well-known artist in South Wales to paint my sister and me (she was 3 or 4). The painting is an image I now treasure. I wanted to give to Callum and Emilie, as well as to my wife and myself, a kind of representation of a moment of family life that was more than photographic. I chose Catherine MacDiarmid because I had already appreciated the honesty of her work. (I had been lucky enough to have had her permission to use one of her paintings on the cover of an earlier book of mine.) A Tetley tea-bag accompanies the portrait because drinking tea is a practice of home-making for me, wherever I happen to be, and whenever