There’s an inverse relationship between the depth and purity of a person’s soul and the extravagance of their window furniture. (I’ll say it again: window furniture. Why not? I’m pretty sure it means curtains.) We all know this. It’s one of the building blocks of this great nation’s civilisation: Do not show off. Do not make a fuss. Don’t shout on trains. Don’t dress too well. Don’t try too hard. And do not — under any circumstances — hang the sort of curtains our mothers might describe as “tart’s knickers” in the windows of the sitting room. Not unless you’re very brave. Or argumentative. Or a very lost soul indeed.
A bit like Pot Noodles and watching telly during breakfast, some things, sufficiently frowned upon in youth, hold an irresistible glister forever after, don’t they? And I’ve had a yen for fancy-pants curtains — ruched and lined and panty-lined and interlined — since I ever knew such things existed. Only I never felt sufficiently settled in a place to invest in them. Until now.
So, several months back, I found an expert willing to sew me some. I gave him the window dimensions and brushed ever so lightly — ha-ha — over the small matter of cost. He brushed that small matter ever so lightly aside, and I wasn’t quite sure how to get back to it. So I didn’t. More importantly (he wanted to know), had I measured the windows properly?
Such disconcerting attention to detail made me pause. It spelt only one thing: expensive. I was out of my depth.
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Quick as a flash, I got him off the telephone. Ducked his calls for several weeks afterwards. When he left a voicemail threatening (it sounded threatening to me) to come round and measure the windows himself, I grabbed the bull by the horns and sent him a text, explaining that we were leaving the country.
I’ve never felt so trapped, so hot and bothered, or so desperate to escape a place in my life
Next stop: Britain’s favourite store. All roads lead there in the end, once you’ve given up on Ikea. I shall be tactful and try quite hard to avoid naming it. As Tony Blair so rightly pointed out in his recent autobiography (What!? You haven’t read it?), we make enough enemies in the normal run of things — there’s no need to go out of our way to make unnecessary ones.
All I’m saying is, forget the odd, partially collapsed tunnel in an otherwise perfectly okay Chilean coal mine: I give you the curtain department at my local branch of — John Lewis. I’ve never felt so trapped, so hot and bothered, or so desperate to escape a place in my life.
Nobody’s fault but mine, of course. And all that. Too much choice. Too many experts tapping away at their calculators, calling me “madam”. The main expert, who advised me the longest, said he wasn’t convinced by my window measurements. He couldn’t read my writing, and neither could I. He suggested I might like to go back home and measure the windows again before placing my final order. Not a chance.
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Sixty-nine days later, to cheers from the waiting prime minister and sundry celebrities at a loose end that afternoon, I was winched from the curtain department into open air, carrying an extendable rail that the calculator expert had warned me repeatedly wasn’t “fit for curtain purpose”, and a set of ready-made curtains one size smaller, for reasons of false economy, than he had suggested I needed.
They’ve been scrumpled in a corner, gathering dust and bits of chocolate biscuit since mid-November, waiting for my other half to step forward and do the honourable thing. He finally did it this weekend, in such a rage, and such a rush, that he fell off the stepladder and had to cancel his football game.
He’s drilled the rail in crooked. It buckles in the middle and there’s a spot where it needs to be held together with Sellotape. I bought the curtains too short, and I’ve pulled the string too tight, so they’re not wide enough. Plus, I didn’t buy enough curtains rings, for reasons of false economy, so everything hangs in messy loops with big patches of window showing through. It would take a peculiarly exhausted tart, and an exorbitantly puritanical mother, to mistake said curtains for knickers.
So there you have it: epiphany No 9087b: extravagant curtains are a sign, not simply of great wealth and a shallow soul, but of the most magnificent dedication to accurate measuring and an ability to take advice from experts. Henceforth, we should set aside our snobbery and look on their owners with a new respect. Next week, reader, we’ll be re-examining People Who Shout on Trains… They may not be as ghastly as they seem.