I’m one of those people who is a little impatient I suppose. I hate being held up on the school run by mums having a conversation across the street. I hate being behind someone with fifty-twelve tokens and a cheque book at the supermarket. I hate walking behind a human weeble along the narrowest pavement ever, watching them lurch from left to right as I desperately attempt to dodge, having to time it to the last microsecond or risk getting flattened.
Chatting can be bothersome too, if you’re not the chatter or the chattee that is. I witnessed my mum become 70’s chatterbox champion, a title I am desperately trying NOT to clinch. I would hate my children to suffer as I did. Blimey you’d think she was trying to kill us reading that! Thankfully it was a much lesser crime consisting of bumping into people on the way home from school – at the corner shop- and chatting for very (very) long periods of time. My sisters and I would patiently wait as mum talked for a while, probably with the same woman she saw the day before, and the day before that come to think of it. After about 12 hours, I would get a sense of the conversation wrapping up with mum taking a slow step back, saying “sooo”. The other lady would shift her weight as if to walk the other way. Then boom, mum would take a step forward again with another nugget of information which required lowered voices and widened eyes. These signs were bad, really bad. They meant there was much more to be discussed either now or tomorrow. A safe and clear passage home could never be guaranteed. You might be thinking that I was bored and impatient as children often are in these situations but that wasn’t all. As mum absorbed herself in a good old natter just yards away, I was often stuck in the car with my two older sisters as they teased and tortured me relentlessly. It was not unknown for them to release the handbrake now and again. Why mum never realised the car was half way down the street when she finally returned to us I’ll never know. Endless chatting was now something I feared. That and corner shops.
These days, despite my attempts to race through life at eye-watering speeds, there are some things that I do take my time over. The coffee table is one of them. We have been after a new coffee table for ooooohhhhh, let’s see, about three years now. I spent about two of those years choosing one, then finally found what I had been yearning for. The trouble is, it is a bit on the pricey side and my husband, who despite sharing my desperation to get shut of our current coffee table, said a big fat no. So we are stale mate. I cannot compromise on this as I have searched for so long. He can only see the credit card bill at the end of the month. I am hopeful he will come round to my way of thinking, I just have to work at it, the way he did when persuading me to ski down a black run after just two days on the slopes. I wasn’t happy about it, ok I was close to morphing into the scariest cartoon baddie you can imagine, but once I’d done it you couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.
Now all I have to do is convince him that a new coffee table will change his life in a similar fashion. The softly softly approach has been tried, tested and abandoned. My carefully compiled presentation of cheaper (and uglier) alternatives has fallen on deaf ears. I am now left with the words of my Grandma, whose stern voice and pointy finger I often channel when relaying her well-worn phrase, “you buy cheap, you buy twice!” Fingers crossed he’ll reconsider.
Little does he know but our trusty old coffee table (bless it) has already been reclassified in my minds inventory as ‘temporary’, until I take delivery of the new one. When that day will be I have absolutely no idea. All I do know is that if I have to spend all day behind a gossiping human weeble with a chequebook to get it, I will do so with pleasure!
Hopefully your husband won’t take so much persuading when it comes to buying quality furniture for your children (See here). Good Luck.