Chairs

I am feeling very excited.

I have bought some new chairs.

We are going to have comfortable chairs for Christmas.

When I say: ‘new chairs’ obviously I mean new in the eBay sense. Obviously I have not splashed out hundreds of pounds on shiny new furniture. It is almost Christmas and already I am having an Amazon Prime Ordering Christmas Present crisis.

It would have been hundreds of pounds as well. When we investigated new dining chairs, the ones that we thought were nice started at around two hundred quid each, and the ones we thought were lovely were a lot more.

Mark was so disgruntled by this that he said that he would prefer to make some, but I have refused point blank to consider this as an option. He has got to build a conservatory and a shed, install a new central heating system, repaint the living room, build a cupboard for our coats and put a bathroom in the loft first.

I do not want to eat my dinner standing up for all of that time.

We are not actually eating standing up, although it is a close run thing. We have got two chairs of the rickety sort, the kind that nobody who is not a family member can be allowed to sit on, and two more chairs which Mark’s sister was chucking out last year. After we had sat on them for a few minutes we worked out why. They are like the sort of things that bank managers have in their office, designed to become so uncomfortable after ten minutes that customers get up and leave quickly.

These must have been designed for a really antisocial bank manager.

Today I was inspired by sitting down to eat breakfast, and had another look on eBay. We have looked a lot at this lately, and been cast down into despondency by inflated chair prices and the unreachableness of wonderful furniture.

Perhaps the approach of the festive season has caused the bottom to drop out of the chair market.

There were two dining chairs that were almost exactly what we were looking for, and nobody had bid on them at all.

I haggled, briefly, and without much hope, but thirty quid later we had bought some chairs.

The reason that nobody had bought them was because they had been marked for Collection Only, and so were inaccessible to anybody who didn’t happen to live in Teeside. Obviously nobody in Teeside had got thirty quid, or else they are all perfectly adequately supplied with comfortable chairs already.

Oliver was going back to school today.

Teeside is about an hour extra driving, there and back.

We did not have thirty quid spare either, but Mark said that he has got a pile of old engines and things that the scrap man is going to come and collect tomorrow, and he thinks there will be enough cash resulting from those to pay for some chairs.

I took Mark’s car, because mine has got a flat tyre, and when I had dropped Oliver off at school I went belting across to Teeside.

One of the chairs is shown on the picture, they are utterly and completely splendid. They are comfortable to sit on, no dogs have chewed any bit of them at all, and they do not wobble.

I was so entirely thrilled and inspired by this success that later on this evening I looked on eBay again and found two more chairs that were exactly what we were looking for as well. They were totally different, but equally perfect, except that they were also collection only and were in Surrey.

I rang Number One Daughter, who just happens to live in Surrey.

I could hear her rolling her eyes even on the telephone. It turns out that Surrey is quite a big place, and it would take her ages and ages to drive to the other end of it.

I had no idea. I thought everywhere in Surrey was near Guildford. It is not like Cumbria, which stretches across huge swathes of the north of England, and is full of mountains and lakes. This is irritating when you are trying to get from one end to the other. I had thought that since Surrey is quite dull, geographically, that it would be a quick dash out on your way to work.

It would appear not.

I don’t care. I have found a man-and-van who will deliver the chairs directly to Number One Daughter’s house. They can be shoved in the back of her car with hardly any trouble at all when they come up for the pantomime, and we will all have a splendidly comfortable chair to sit on for Christmas dinner.

Even if she does say rude things about me when she is trying to pack her car, I won’t be there to hear them.

I am not going to think about the Christmas luggage and our own car space, which last year occupied every single available inch of car.

Mark will organise that in Manchester.