THE OBSTRUCTIVE OFFICE CHAIR OF DESTINY

Have you ever noticed that if there’s just one thing that really shouldn’t be in a room, no matter where you put it down, it always somehow manages to get in the way? Recently, the beloved and I took a very long overdue trip to the public rubbish tip, or ‘recycling centre’ as I’m supposed to now call it, to dispose of some of the mountains of clutter that we had been maneuvering around and knocking over for quite some considerable time now. Part of that clutter included my old office chair which I had been parking my not inconsiderable behind on for quite some years, but the seat of which had worn away exposing the foamy goodness within, which no doubt now utterly reeked of, not to put too fine a point on it, me, and was starting to scatter itself about the house whenever I moved around after sitting there.

I was given that chair by a very good friend many, many years ago when I was living in my little flat in the inner city and bought my first home computer, which, rather amazingly, managed not to get itself hauled through a window by burglars despite being there alone in the day for a fair few years. Anyway, we’d been through a lot of good years together, but the wear and tear had got too much and on a trip to a well-known Swedish furniture outlet last year, a replacement was bought. This move was not without some trepidation, because I had a vague feeling that some of the best things I’d ever written had been written whilst sitting in that old chair of mine and I thought of it, in some small way, as being my ‘lucky’ chair, and I thought, not unreasonably I believed, that anything I wrote whilst in my new chair might run the possibility of not being nearly as good.

Sadly, as we loaded up the various bits of tat to make that trip to the tip, it became apparent that there simply wasn’t enough room to fit it into the car for that trip and so it remained behind, sitting in the kitchen, awaiting its fate, and we went off and disposed of our rubbish and carried on with our day.

Sadly, over the course of the next week, the chair did little to endear itself to my memory. It was on castors and, for some strange reason, no matter where you put it, it just kept on getting in the way. You’d put it in front of the sink, and you’d have to move it to do the washing up. Move it in front of the cupboards, and you’d have to move it every time you fancied a biscuit. Put it in front of the washing machine, and the latest wash would cause you to move it again. Shift it in front of the cooker, and your next pizza would require it to be shifted again. Try and stand it in the middle of the floor and it would just be constantly getting in the way no matter what you tried to do, and you might very well fall over it in the dark…

Oh…

You know what…?

You really don’t need to be wasting your time reading this rubbish, do you…?

I did once say that if I ever started to tell you tell you about my new office chair, then it would be time to give this up...

I think that maybe that time has come.