Now there’s light at the end of the Covid tunnel, conversational topics turn to “What did you do in the Great Lockdown?”
Without shame, I admit to binge-watching antiques, collectibles, re-purposing and restoration programmes, viz. Money for Nothing, Find It, Fix it, Flog It, Antiques Roadshow, Dickinson’s Real Deal, The Yorkshire Auction House and Salvage Hunters. Sometimes, by judicious use of the channel-changing button, all on the same day.
They did much to dispel the relentless gloom of the news and gave me the satisfaction of frequently uttering the phrase, “We had one of those!” I’m of a generation reared in and on ‘brown furniture’, when things were solid, well-made and built to last. Newly-weds then, lived with the stuff they inherited or bought second hand and kept till they celebrated their Golden Wedding anniversary. We, their children, reared on gloomy oak, teak and mahogany, may have hankered after the thrill of the new and modern, but never got it until we set up our own homes and could please ourselves.
The Loving Spouse and I started married life with a jumble of inherited brown basics – until I broke out and bought an ultra-modern Mary Quant daisy-patterned three-piece suite. Auntie Mollie was not impressed. “What class of a figary is that?” she asked. I still have it, though its raffish incongruity is now decently shrouded in grey loose covers in the conservatory, where it offends nobody.
The concept of creating a ‘look’ only really took popular hold with the new liberalism of the Sixties, which saw a revolution in architecture, art and design; simple shapes, new materials, an adventurous explosion of colour. I’ll never forget my visit to Britain’s very first IKEA store in Milton Keynes. It was an assault on the senses – Scandinavian simplicity of design and singing colour. I came away wanting to make a funeral pyre of every stick of furniture in our house, though the first breach in the dyke of tradition was buying a coffee table from Habitat in Cambridge. The cost of transporting it to Norn Iron almost matched its price. It sat looking incongruous in the living room full of ‘traditional’ furniture and was soon relegated to the conservatory to keep the daisy-dappled suite company.
I should have known better, because the incident of my father’s armchair caused the greatest upset of my teenage years. It stood by the fireplace – a wide-armed, high-backed, leather-covered item, saggy-seated, its surface creased with age in spidery vein-like cracks and the sheen of polish and wear. An inherited piece, it bore the imprint of my father’s shape and his father’s before him. He’d come home in the evening, settle himself in it and open the ‘Irish News’. My mother loathed the great lumpen thing. One day he came in and there it was – gone. And in its place, an ultra-modern bright red leather egg-shaped yoke on a chrome tripod base. Well, the incandescent row that broke out persuaded me I was the child of a broken home. There was no peace until it was replaced by a sober green wing-backed Parker-Knoll – but he never forgave my mother and upcast it for years.
Rather late in the day, I discovered my taste was more traditional than adventurous and stuck with the former. My chief delight is hoking about among old things that’ll sit comfortably with inherited stuff, and if you turn the damaged bit to the wall, nobody’ll notice. (Restoration is not my forte.) There’s an Edwardian cabinet in the hall that had to be screwed to the wall because it has a wonky leg and the doors creak slowly open of their own accord, unless restrained by double-sided tape. But it looks good.
Daughter Dear, a child of the 80s (currently planning a third re-vamp of a bedroom in five years) has made it clear when I go, so does all my stuff – except Nanny Robinson’s Arts and Crafts period bedroom suite. She has a discerning eye. Ho-hum. What goes around comes around. Keep a thing long enough….
