Some New Furniture

It was a bit odd, I’ll give you that. After all, domestic furniture is not supposed to breed – at least, not as far as I know. Although, I do tend to fall behind and miss out on the latest trends, fashions and so forth, I think I would have noticed something in the news about the spawning habits of furniture. At least, I’d like to think so.

Anyway, there it was. I opened the door to what others in the family call the lounge, and I call the front room, to find it there.

A brand new baby sofa.

It certainly looked like one of ours; we have two normal sized sofas in the loun… front room, rather than the traditional three-piece suite. But that morning when I walked into the room, while the rest of the family slept, there were our normal two sofas and on the rug between them another tiny little sofa about the size of a full-grown Labrador.

After standing and staring for a while, I did what any normal, sensible person does when confronted by an unexplainable mystery. I shut the door and walked away… into the kitchen.

In the kitchen, I busied myself with the kettle and the coffee-making equipment while that small part of my mind that functions in the early-morning pre-coffee state tried to make sense of what I’d seen.

The tiny little sofa was the same colour and design as our two, or rather both are leather three-seaters, but there are slight differences between them in the colour and design, not enough for a man to care about, but my wife and daughters still agonised over whether the two sofas really ‘went together’… whatever that means. All I know is that I can put the telly on, lie down on either of them and be asleep in a few minutes. Therefore, as far as I’m concerned they are fine – anyway, who cares what colour something is when you are asleep on it?

The little sofa had the look of being the offspring of the other two. A blend, like our kids look like someone has taken the essence of us two parents and whizzed it all up in a blender and poured the mix out, with their best features being mine, of course, and their bad tempers and general irritability down to their mother’s less, than perfect genetic inheritance, which – if you knew her parents – would certainly make sense to you.

I remembered, as the kettle boiled, the wife – Jenny – complaining recently about one of the sofas being lumpy in the middle. Perhaps that was why: one of our sofas had been pregnant, and now here was the little one.

Smiling to myself, I made my way to the stairs to tell everyone else in the family the good news.