You can tell something about national character from the way a country clears its cupboards. In the States they have the yard sale. The American dream remains a detached house with a front and a back yard, all enclosed by a white picket fence. Daughter selling lemonade, son playing catch, consumer goods spread on the lawn. The French have the vide grenier — the emptying of the attic. The Frenchman in his romantic soul still imagines he is a poet or a painter starving for love and art in a bare, unfurnished room. The English have the car-boot sale. We take a picnic, waterproofs, stop at a stone circle on the way, and when we are ready to pack up and leave, we leave.
Back in Blighty after a year in France, I have been finding homes for my attic trufflings. The cups from Vincennes, the napkins from Aix, the enamel pot from Avignon, the measuring jug from Bordeaux: all part of a campaign to undo what I had previously done. Decorating the flat eight years ago, I furnished by brochure: Ikea and Oka. A friend, now the proprietor of a smart shop in Kensington, came for a housewarming dinner. ‘Oh,’ he said, looking around. ‘Just like the catalogues.’ I’m still smarting.
Some people declutter, I decatalogue. As each Ikea colander and side table has split, buckled and collapsed, I have replaced it with something sturdier, secondhand. Don’t believe that millennials won’t buy brown furniture. This one does. Edwardian desks, Victorian chests, campaign tables. Anything but a Billy bookcase. Cheaper, too, by some multiples, than the mid-century-modernish stuff at Dwell, Nest and Made.
I wonder, though, as I look proudly around the nest I have made, whether I might not have fallen into another sort of trap.
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