Anything Else

MoE recommends...Interiors

The Lakeland site is one of the best I've seen. Order online.

Topaz: "rustic Mexican pine furniture". Sounds appalling, looks amazing. Costs a lot, unfortunately.

Laura Ashley: Try not to prejudge. Some of their household stuff is actually nice and there are sales on at the moment. Laura Ashley does sales properly.

The Pier

House Of Fraser: "aspirational products for stylish homes". Someone's got a superiority complex. Summer sale, however, although you won't find out much about it on their madly non-intuitive website that seems to be based on a blogspot template.

Angela Carter said "comedy is a tragedy that happens to other people," which is very much how I used to feel about interior design. That it was a tragedy that happens to other people. But, in small doses, it's not so bad. By which I mean, for example, my beautiful charcoal corner sofa, and not, say House Doctor's "just beautiful" juxtaposition of a round vase next to a candle and violently ugly wooden giraffe on a mantlepiece. According to House Doctor, the combination of the three shapes in a corner automatically jumpstarts Beauty, but I couldn't get past the fantasy that she had been trying to construct a surreallist sculpture of the 1939 World's Fair, with the giraffe standing for a kind of abstract Trylon and the candle representing the Perisphere. In fact, how much cooler would that have been? I'll begin work on one immediately.

Speaking of Dr Bizarro's wooden giraffe, who's been to The Pier recently? The Pier has a nice reassuringly prepositioned title, but that very preposition suggests something inappropriately precise. I mean, what pier exactly? Is it an ironic allusion to the capitalist game they must play, as if the attitude or ethic of this exotic homewares supplier somehow resembles that of pocket-money draining arcade machines? The place is stacked with thick coloured glass and things that might be for for food, or candles, or feeding candles...everything is latticed, "jewelled" or in jewel colours. There's a considerable amount of vaguely spiritual imagery going on, and a gigantic giraffes do make an appearance, I'm sure. Don't get me wrong, it's not all disgusting, but it works better apart than it does together. It's great at Christmas, for example, and superb for one-off presents, lights, and the odd simple piece. But as a whole, the eclectic clamouring shopfloor poses more questions than it answers, for example, which Indiana Jones villain's lair of illegally appropriated treasures have I just fallen into?


At some point in their lives everyone who is interested in these things realises they might have slightly overstepped a line, abandoned the ethical question, and dragged something innocent and natural over the sacred threshold into their own fragrantly carpetted home. What begins well as a kind of charmingly animated, bogroll-bound performing accessory, can too easily be turned into a dew-eyed hostage in the inevitable assaults that follow. You know no one understands that you didn't just buy that puppy to match your hat, and one day you will find yourself holding your child-substitute, all big trusting eyes, like a shield against accusations that you value style over substance or care more for colour co ordination than correct worming techniques.

When I was a student I bought two baby mice. "What will you do if they have babies?" by brother asked, "I don't know, take them outside and release them I guess," I quipped. "You would too, you're probably harsh enough," came the po-faced reply, as he spun on his cuban heel and marched out of my life forever. A little unfair, I think. Contrary to popular belief I don't think I am actually monstrous enough to wilfully advance the death of small innocent creatures, but I am nowhere near beyond involving the lives of any beast, not the cognizant innocent nor the idiotic, nor all the idiot savants that lurk between, to bring about what I would like to think of as a small victory in the war against unaesthetic combinations. What I'm trying to say is, I bought three goldfish today because there was space on top of the fridge that I couldn't work out how to fill...until I realised that it was just crying out for a large circular, slightly mobile feature. Our flat now contains three Interior Design Pets.

I felt a bit bad about it, then I thought of a line my hero and master of the meaningless maxim, Woody Allen, delivers in the eponymous film. Whenever Jerry (who in real life is Jason Biggs in American Pie) complains about the brash unpredictability of love and pies, the paranoid but witty old Jew character who in no way resembled Allen replies, "But y'know...It's just like anything else" and everyone in the cinema stands up and cheers. I'm bad because I'm using animals to solve an interior design problem. But it's just like anything else. Obviously not in the sense that I'm Christina Ricci and I'm cheating on Jason Biggs with my doctor. That was in the past. What I mean is I'm not alone. Everyone who cares about something will walk a fine ethical line to get it. Unless what they care about is in itself ethical, I guess, in which case they will probably position themselves on one or other side of the line. I think goldfish are the ultimate interior pets. They do very little, but look fabulous. And they wouldn't know an ethical line if you drew it on their brain with indelible marker. I imagine.