A man came round to measure up for my new curtains this morning. He arrived before 9 and I was still in my dressing gown and bleary eyed and hungover (hoping I hadnÂ’t said anything embarrassing to Roger McGough later in the evening).
I was not really in the mood for human company and was much less in the mood to talk to a stranger about how I imagined my curtains being hung and what kind of nodules I wanted on my curtain poles and whether I needed kumquats to hold the curtains back when they were open (the terminology in this entry may not be accurate, largely because I do not find curtains interesting enough to remember the minor details of what goes into making them what they are).
I showed him the places I wanted curtains (which was almost exclusively by some openings I have in my walls that are covered with glass rather than brick) and he would look at the place I had suggested a bit askew and then spend four or five minutes explaining what would make it difficult to hang a curtain in this space. I couldnÂ’t really be bothered to listen to what he was saying. I find curtains at best functional and at worse extremely boring and the reason I was paying a man to come and put them up was so that I wouldnÂ’t have to think about curtains for a second more than was necessary.
Fortunately there always seemed to be a way round the curtain problem. It usually seemed to involve me spending more money on something. The man also felt it necessary to go through every option and show me pictures of every single possible different thing I could have. None of these things were curtains, which were already chosen. They were the flintlocks and other paraphanalia of the curtain world.) I thought about explaining to him that I find having choices so terrifying that I canÂ’t even choose a washing machine, so am in no position to judge whether I would rather have a rope to hold my curtains back, or a kumquat or a different piece of material and I am certainly not interested in hearing the details of how you round the fabric off and fuse it together (again these details are probably inaccurate because I wasnÂ’t listening to him. IÂ’m pretty sure kumquats were not involved).
He was extremely knowledgeable about curtains and their accessories, which is useful given that he works in the curtain field, but after an hour became almost impossibly boring for me. Of course this may have been his tactic. To blind me with curtain science so that I felt forced just to take his word for what I required, which of course would be the most expensive thing possible.
I wanted to shout at him “Stop talking to me about curtains. Just do what you have to do, however much it costs and then go away and only come back when you’re going to put the curtains up, at which time I would also request that you refrain from talking about curtains. I don’t like curtains. I would like to live in a world without curtains. But I understand that curtains are a necessary evil in this world and so I will tolerate their presence. Only through their evil can the good that is me being naked in my house be allowed to happen.”
I didn’t shout that though. I just said, “Yes, I can see I need a chrome friggery on this window. Yes, get me one of those. No you really don’t need to give me the history of the friggery or tell me any amusing stories of how other customers have regretted installing their own friggery without the assistance of friggery professionals. Oh, you have anyway. No I don’t need to see the friggery catalogue. Yes they look very nice. That’s the actual size is it? Good. Surely they can’t really be called friggeries. No they aren’t, but they are called something so dull and unnecessary that no-one could be expected to remember the name (or function) of them 24 hours later.”
After a couple of hours it was time for him to move on to his next victimÂ…. I mean customer.
HeÂ’d actually been really helpful.
Though his mobile phone played the Scoobey Doo theme, which probably reveals more than this entire entry
