Sofa, so good

In the month or two before I left home, some years ago, while I was waiting for my future landlords to fix up the room I was going to move into, I spent quite a bit of time shooting the breeze with my future flatmates in my home-to-be. They had the most uncomfortable sofa I had ever sat on. It was a four seater, with each seat so deep and at such an angle that anyone under five eight sat with their legs sticking straight out. As with ninety percent of all flat sofas, it was coloured in shades of brown and beige. Its arms were tan vinyl and its springs could be felt through the thin acrylic cover on the cushions.

Knowing that this sofa awaited me, I went on a trawl of second hand shops for something better, finding in the end a green three-seater which came in three separate chairs you pushed together, the outer two each with a large rounded arm. The whole thing was covered all over in what looked like an outsize version of moss stitch, and the back was a series of rounded surfaces rather than flat.

Through this sofa I won friends and influenced people. However, being of some vintage when I bought it, it has come to look as if its best days are behind it. It has, however, survived not too badly the last nine months of two-dog-householdery, while the same cannot be said of the two even older foam rubber sofas that I appropriated from friends and family when I moved into my own home.

At the beginning of the winter this year, harvestmother and my grandmother staged a sofa intervention and declared their intention to buy me some new furniture, which was entirely welcome since I have no budget of my own for upholstery. A factory in town that previously only supplied trade was now making to order for the public, with prices closer to second hand that what you’d pay in the shops. So harvestmother and I spent a happy afternoon in June trying out all the different sofas in their factory (except for the miniature ones made for children) and comparing fabric swatches before picking out a low-slung, rolled-arm two-seater model and ordering one in red and one in blue, in a fabric the owner assured us was guaranteed for ten years unless chewed.

A month later than the four weeks manufacturing time they promised, I was getting a little antsy, not least because the dogs had managed to dig through the covering in the middle seat of my old sofa and were starting to figure out the thinking behind the car-rug temporary cover solution. However, this morning, the call came. We could come in and settle up and arrange delivery.

“But I want them now,” said I to harvestdad. “Couldn’t I hire a trailer with sides?”

“My car has no towbar,” said he, “and yours couldn’t tow the skin off a rice pudding.” (The pudding part was his exact phrase.) He’s not wrong about that; whoever put the towbar on my poor underpowered hatchback obviously had a cruel sense of humour.

So we chanced it, in the proud tradition of our culture, and took harvestdad’s car into the factory. A modicum of heavy lifting and moving the front seats forward so far that harvestmother could have driven the car (what is it with drivers who don’t like to extend their leg to reach the clutch?) and we found to our considerable satisfaction that we could get the door closed on the first sofa.

Less than an hour later I was deciding which would would be my eating and reading sofa and which would be my TV-watching sofa, and Millie was discovering that she could not only sit quite comfortably across the adjacent rolled arms of red and blue, but also that it was an excellent position from which to taunt Arthur. The “no digging on the sofa” rule, previously largely observed in the breach, is now being strictly enforced twice over. There was nothing for it but to spend the rest of the day dubbing the rest of the Sopranos episodes on to tapes for Dangermouse and establishing whether the indifferent review of Monteith’s Radler linked to yesterday was indeed justified. (Answer: yes, but not enough, having purchased it, to justify not drinking it.)

I did stop watching TV for a while to read an essay from the Heidegger and the Holocaust collection, but there seemed something not right about engaging with such a lamentable subject in such comfort.

The only complaint I have about the sofas is that they smell rather musty, the smell of the assembly area of the factory, but a week or two of habituation chez harvestbird will no doubt take care of that.

I don’t usually like to share material for which I have no source, but harvestdad sent me this this morning and tells me it was sent to him by a colleague who got it from a humour mailing list, which suggests (I hope) public domain. It doesn’t entirely scan, and I always thought “lithe” was pronounced “leeth”, but it’s cute enough nonetheless:

The Hokey Pokey, Shakespearean Style

O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke.
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from heaven’s yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.
The Hoke, the poke; banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, ’tis what it’s all about.