Real life | 9 July 2011

One day in the early Nineties, a trainee recruitment consultant looked down at their carpet and thought, ‘I wonder what’s under there.’ And so began a mania for exposed floorboards that has had the British professional aspirant class in a vice grip ever since.

My twenty-something upstairs neighbours are currently in this grip. Nothing will dissuade them from the notion that tatty old bare boards are fantastically chic and fancy and that they have an inalienable human right to walk upon said boards, making an unholy racket.

I simply cannot understand it. When I was growing up, bare floorboards were a matter of shame. A family’s prosperity was measured by the depth and silkiness of their shagpile. Adverts for Allied Carpets and its perpetual ‘greatest ever sale’ were ubiquitous in the part of the Midlands where I grew up. Ever more elaborate kinds of Axminster were the talk of every household.

And it didn’t stop at carpet.