Five things
lamps, books, snobbery, yaks and a quick roundup of nice things
God, it’s like someone shat in the punch. Sorry to say shat in the punch, but really. Still, onwards. This is not a newsletter about politics, or about global consternation, and in my view every bleak event needs a frivolity chaser - not that finding comfort in small bits of joy is remotely frivolous, au contraire. It is SANITY.
Reading lamps
My automatic response to stress is to make my house nice via major tidying and/or reorganisation. Yesterday while moving a sofa by myself - I get a weird surge of superhuman strength - I realised I’ve always done this. I’d lug massive pieces of furniture around my bedroom aged 12, to take my mind off nuclear war.
Anyway: as I’ve written before, I’m big on good, meaning golden and dim, lighting. It looks lovely, and everybody looks lovely in it, but it does mean that it’s quite difficult to read, since reading requires ugly white light, which I cannot thole. I used to have these brilliant, very skinny IKEA lamps that sort of disappeared discreetly behind sofas, un-noticed until you needed to see properly, but they stopped making them.
I’ve been looking for an alternative ever since with varying degrees of success, and now - well, last week - I have found the perfect iteration. Still from IKEA, and a mere £17. I assembled them yesterday - they do the disappearing thing, and they have necks that you can bend to your will. They’re new and they’re called Sambord, thus:
I know - not necessarily a design classic, but they do the job perfectly because they recede into the room, I think thanks to that white shade. Also they’re not too tall (most are). I’m very pleased with them and have just ordered more.
But is it common?
Nicky Haslam’s How Common tea towel, now an annual event, has appeared. I love how worked up people get about it, when really it’s only a Mitfordian tease, done in the spirit of mischief, purely to provoke. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, it’s a tea towel printed with a list of things that Mr Haslam, a very smart and well-connected interior decorator, finds vulgar).
How Common is my fault, weirdly. Nine million years ago my former husband and I were having dinner with Nicky and he was making us (and himself) die laughing with his various pronouncements. His absolutely peak story about commonness concerned a famous man who had to divorce one of his many wives because he just couldn’t bear what she said in bed at the point of orgasm - it was SO COMMON that it completely threw him off his stride, night after night. Disaster!
The man tried to explain this to her - ‘darling, can you not? - and she’d said oh okay, FINE, but obviously in the furthest throes she couldn't help herself and out came the intolerable phrase. (I remain extremely taken with this whole concept - just thinking about it is making me laugh. I keep forgetting to put it in a book but I will, which is why I’m not telling you what the words were. But yes, pretty grim).