In the days when burnt orange meant failed marmalade rather than a colour we all seem to have in our living-rooms, I set out to buy new stair carpet.
All over Britain people were treading their turkey-red or leafy-brown staircases. I wanted to be different.
‘I know,’ I said, ‘We’ll have olive green. It will be a breakthrough.’
Painstakingly I went around the shops describing the colour in terms of US Army officers’ uniforms. ‘A kind of brownish green,’ I would say with an encouraging smile. So the assistant would dart off behind some kind of private arras, and I would hear my request repeated to the accompaniment of hearty laughter and long pauses.
Then a much senior man would drift out. ‘Do you mean brown, Madam, or green?’ he would say, enunciating with precision.
Eventually we tracked down something which sounded right and which had to be specially ordered. It turned out to be dark moss, but at least our stairs were different for a while. Then, suddenly, all over the country, shops were flooded with a complete range of moss-to-olive-green carpeting.
The last straw came when the baker peered knowingly over my shoulder and said ‘I see you’ve got the same stair carpet as your friend next door!’
I don’t really get peevish about this sort of thing but my goodwill did wear a trifle thin over the wall-light incident.
Finding nothing but individual candle sconces locally I headed for the Design Centre, found a rather unusual lighting fixture, and sent away to the manufacturers for details. Then I ordered it through our local shop.
When I went to collect it the shopkeeper was looking pleased with himself. He liked it so much, he said, that he had ordered several dozen. His window was crammed full of them. All exactly the same as mine. Oh, and by the way, could he keep my catalogue please?
Nowadays, various children and pets later, I don’t worry so much about these things. The burnt-orange overtones in our living-room carpet mostly are marmalade and the stair carpet is lumpy with secreted Lego bricks.
Children, of course, are deeply suspicious of anything which makes them the least bit different from their contemporaries.
‘But I’ve got to wear knee-length socks,’ they say. ‘Everyone in our class wears them.’
And they fling aside several pairs of rotten old new tights and umpteen snowy white socks which, despicably, reach no further than mid-calf.
I met a thoroughly hounded school mum the other day.
‘It’s my seven-year-old,’ she burst out. ‘She got black patent tee-strap shoes, and brown leather sandals, and red ballet slippers and a pair of those Dr Scholl wooden things. All absolutely unworn. Apparently you’re just nobody at the moment if you aren’t slopping around in rubber flip-flaps.’
There is little point in explaining flip-flaps. Like French skipping, the craze has either swept through your neighbourhood, or it hasn’t.
But once we begin to grow up, there is a certain panache in cultivating some slight streak of individuality, if it is only a case of switching to green ink for writing our thank you letters. Or even, these days, of just writing them.
Personally, I love to meet unusual people. The lady in the floppy Leghorn hat who knows that she is really Charlotte Bronte; the motherly soul who always keeps matches in the tin marked Prunes, ‘for safety, dear’; the racy one who flings open her cocktail cabinet and says ‘Would you rather have Tizer or my own potato sherry?’ (Give the wrong answer and you join the other reeling guests.)
I especially like the lady who said to me the other day, ‘Do you take lovers?’ She wasn’t actually offering me them one at a time – like a sugar-lump – but she said it in exactly the same conversational tone.
So let’s all make life more interesting for everybody by lining our curtains with purple satin. Or by wearing a feather boa round the house. (We can always dust things with the end of it.) Or by taking playful karate lunges at the postman.
When people say, ‘Which one is Mary Brown?’, let the reply be ‘Oh, she’s the brunette who’s so good at playing the comb and paper,’ or perhaps ‘The blonde who does taxidermy in her greenhouse.’ Even, ‘That redhead who knits her own dishcloths.’
As for me, well I’m way ahead at the moment because there’s a fox asleep in our living-room.
But that’s another story.