Boring Space

I know a woman who decorates her house every five minutes. From pale blue dados to blushing pink borders.
I have never said anything but her house is boring. The space is neither comforting nor vibrant it’s just clean.
Modern interior design is not my taste. Bland colours and square kitchen islands do not speak homely to me.
I like a table with chairs, table mats and a candelabra to light up meals times. Sitting on a bar stool, knees tucked up and no room to put the condiments doesn’t encourage conversation or good digestion.
Bring back family tables and vases of daffodils.
I like a space to be colourful and soft. Deep cushions and patterned rugs. My house is a jumble of styles. Although you could say it doesn’t have any style at all.
Royal blue fitted carpet up the stairs, into the hall. Red carpet in our bedroom and Persian rugs in the baby room. The bathroom had an emerald green carpet until it had to be changed to a fluffy grey job.
The attic has a fitted grey carpet which I burnt a hole in with a rogue candle. The old git, when he was the bodger king, cut squares out of the red carpet remnants and placed it over the scorched damage. He then made a feature by cutting out more red squares and placing them randomly on the floor. It looks lovely.
Ah! That was then when the old man could, and did, fix everything.
We had a hole in the attic ceiling. Rain drip dripping onto the carpet. The ‘oosbind chewed on his thumb and thought for a bit. Wearing a tiny t-shirt he trotted down stairs. Brought up a long piece of string. Placed the rubber plant under the hole, attached the string to the ceiling and fashioned the string into the plant pot. We had a perfect irrigation system.
Alas! Times have changed and we now have to buy bodgers in.

I grew up with a father who decorated every year. We had wood chip wall paper painted black. Scandinavian contemporary furniture and washable wallpaper in the kitchen
Our first flat had lime green, pop art decor, the kitchen wallpaper was covered in prawns in their pink shells. No condensation could destroy that sea food scene.

When we were rehoused my bedroom was painted pink and purple. My brothers room had airfix model airplanes hanging from the ceiling and a cupboard full of First world war German helmets.
The kitchen was white
The front room (as we called it) had beige carpets and Ercole furniture. Swedish designs that now go for a lot at auctions.
Nobody had a say in the decoration my father made unilateral decisions. He’d come home and draw his finger along the shelves making sure my mother had dusted.
I prefer Quenton Crisps’ houseworkery, minimal dusting and memories, From my pottery head on the mantel piece which I made when I was 14, to displays of arty gifts from friends and family.
In fact I have a drawing of Quentin wearing a loin cloth hanging next to a Yuri Geller cartoon and a poster from the Globe

The Ashkenazy tribe are doom, gloom and culture. However poor we were there was always a piano on board.
So I had piano lessons from the age of five.
Learning the basics in Toynbee Hall in Aldgate.
And then we moved and I was sent to Mrs. Liley in Shenley Road, Boreham Wood.
Mrs. Liley had a house in the centre of the town, and then she moved to the big house at the end of our road.
Twelve council hours, were dwarfed by Mrs. Liley’s pile.
Our new builds had a kitchen, sitting room, three bedrooms, a bathroom, a big back garden and quince bushes in the front garden planted by the council.
The big house at the end of the road had a swirling drive.
I would walk from my house to my piano lessons. Standing on tip toe I would pull the bell.
It was only a short walk but I went from one world into another.

In the grand house I was ushered to the piano room up a helical staircase with a sweeping curve. I had never seen such opulence. The elegance was a long way from our thirteen steps up to our freezing bathroom.
For years ice formed on the inside of the windows making getting out of a bed mission, a dash into the arctic wash room was done speedily and efficiently.
The big house had cream walls and a mural of a tree – in black paint – with swirling branches.
Playing the grand piano in such surroundings made for better music.
I realised, aged seven, that black wood chip was not de rigour. That silhouette of the tree spoke to me of individual decisions. You could make a wall be whatever you wanted.
Indeed it opened up the possibility of anything and everything.

Mrs. Liley had two pianos. Both baby grands. The room was huge. She’d play I had to improvise. She got me to transpose from one key to another.
Her pianos were polished, I was taken by the shiny finger board and would watch the reflection of my fingers playing my scales.

When we moved to the cottage we found a man in Surbiton who was selling his boudoir grand. A dark mahogany piano from 1938, smaller than a grand but bigger than an upright.
We went to hear the piano. He played Schumann’s ‘Scenes from Childhood’
When he hit the top ‘A’ my mind was made up.
The vibration of that lone note shook my body.
Half the room is taken up by that one instrument.
The cottage is home to years of clutter, but it’s my clutter.
Blue dados and brushing pink it ain’t.
Years ago a newtobe mother visited. I was pregnant with the dawter.
‘You must think my house is a shithole’ I said, having visited her pristine nursery.
‘No I used to live in one myself’ she said.
She’d moved on up, my cottage was a thing of her past. She’d adopted sickly pastel shades and pink blushing borders.
She’s now dead and her daughter is an accountant.
Nuff said.