My desk has life!

A couple of weeks ago a good friend of mine sent me an email which made me laugh out loud. It’s a humorous recount of a recent furniture purchase she made and, with her permission, I thought I’d share an excerpt with you…

“My husband and I recently use a portion of our savings to buy a desk from a roadside antique store. It is a hundred years old, solid mahogany, and it has more storage space than we have wedding gifts to fill it with.

While I looked at it I started to wonder what the workshop that made the desk a hundred years ago might have looked like, and how much the workers were paid, and what they ate during their lunch breaks (if they had any)… I wondered who may have sat at that desk, and what kind of work they may have created there…I wondered whether, throughout its life, it had always been a man’s terrain…I imagined that the desk had such a rich life and I wanted to share in its history.

Amidst great excitement, it was delivered on Monday while I was away at work; daydreaming about my new (old) desk. We left instruction with our house-keeper for the delivery to take residence in our spare room below three caricatures of judges that I bought with birthday money some time ago. I believed it waited proudly for us on its new ground. When I got home from work, I bounded into the spare room… but, surprisingly I didn’t like the desk.

It made the beautiful blue room with its lentil-coloured curtains and dainty old bookcase look sombre. It made my get-well shaggy teddy bear look shy and silly. This impostor in my calm, little, shabby room conspired with the judges to scare me. It succeeded at making me believe that I could never produce work at its statuesque helm that would be worthy of its stature.

So it is moving out before the wine fridge shines its blue light on empty shelves.

I’ll get a refund and it ain’t being replacing by a Victorian headboard. I need my sleep… and ultimately some babies will be nice too. A prude Victorian ghost is not quite the ambience I’m after.”

Do you have any similar stories? Are there any pieces of furniture you own that feel like ‘imposters’ in your home?