It’s bold, I know, and probably a little foolish, but Geoff and I are making an assumption about the weather. We think we may have more than one day of proper sunshine this year. There has been one, we know, and it was that glorious experience of being warm and having an inner glow that made us suspect another could be along in, ooh, say two months’ time.
Based on this, we have made a decision to upgrade our garden furniture. For something that gets precious little use, it is having much thought devoted to it. In fact, I would say we are probably thinking more about garden furniture than we are about the EU referendum and the future of space exploration. Yes, that much.
We already have garden furniture – metal table and chairs that live out all year round – and boy, are they showing their age (and years of neglect). Hitherto, in my life, anything that lived out in one of our winters at least had the comfort and protection of a New Zealand rug and a good warming feed, but this furniture has never had so much as a caring pat.
The consequence of its neglect is that is not looking its loveliest. It needs a body tuck here and there, a serious rubbing down and repaint, and even a few limb transplants. In short, its better days were too long ago for it to recapture any good bits of its youth, so we are planning to relegate the table to a place beside a wall where it will live in retirement as a slightly lop-sided stand for pots.
The chairs will have a few screws tightened and I’ll administer a lecture about smartening themselves up in the hope that the rubbing-down and painting fairies will overhear and will surprise me by paying a visit.
This, we have cleverly worked out, will leave us with seats to sit on but no table. A table is necessary for those long balmy evenings when we eat our supper outside and talk long into the night with our friends, just like the adverts show us we all do through summer in England.
The cynic in us knows that it is more likely to be one borderline-mild night with a disappointing chilly breeze that will send us scuttling indoors, but we’ll still need a table if we are even to contemplate being sociable in an outdoors way. But what sort of table and where do we get it?
We’ve looked and failed to find anything that fits the bill. Those that fall within our budget are either too small or too ugly, or both. We’re not asking much: just a table with legs that don’t wobble or buckle, with a flat surface and with a love of the outdoors, in all weathers.
I’d prefer it if it didn’t have a name. I’m up to here with looking at fancy things called Riviera, Tuscany and Calypso. I mean, for heaven’s sake, this is Dorset not Cap d’Antibes.
Just show me an anonymous table that looks the part and I’ll be happy, and then we can bring it home and it can gradually acquire a name, in the same way that all our possessions do. Indoors, we have two tables, Tyrone and Ivo, so it might be nice to have a girl-table for once. I just hope she’ll be up to the job and not make a fuss, stuck out there in the wind and the rain. And after that she’ll have to face up to autumn and winter.
Sally Hill's Journal 