Magic with Mirrors

My most recent search has been for bedside tables to go with the Oak bed in our master. It is a solid, fairly pleasant affair with a design which could safely pass off as a contemporary style but equally if mixed with the right pieces could fit in easily in a country cottage setting as well.

I went on to discover that bedside tables are one of the most neglected areas in high street furniture design. Having trawled through a vast variety of utterly uninspiring blocky oak affairs online and in stores I was just about ready to give up.

When I spotted on ebay a bedside table with a mirrored finish. They were called Venetian but to me were quite reminiscent of the Art Deco era. They were simple elegant, roomy and practical, would go with almost any decor and wouldn't add visual bulk to the room either. Hmmm definitely an option at £125 a piece +£20 delivery. As ever delivery for heavy items is a killer on ebay but it still wasn't a bad deal at £145 per table.

But having been spoiled by my search for table lamps I had come to believe that if you saw something nice retailing on ebay there was inevitably a posher cousin to be found somewhere in the real world. Just to satisfy my curiosity I started looking around.


And then I saw the Charlston range by Laura Ashley. Now that bedside table (image alongside) truly tickled every acquisitive bone in my body. Incredibly sleek with lovely curved wooden legs, it was just so sophisticated, though inevitably much pricier than its ebay cousin. At £250 a piece it was clearly beyond budget. To really rub salt in the wound it even went on sale, the week after I saw it, coming down to a tantalizing £187 a piece - low enough to make me lust uncontrollably but not enough for me to actually be able to afford it.

Life's not fair I thought! Thats the one I really, really want - surely my true and ardent devotion has got to be worth another £40 odd to Laura Ashley. Anyhow a couple of weeks of moping and frantic searching for further discounted versions on the internet ensued. But to no avail! If anything I kept bumping into fancier and fancier versions of mirrored bedside tables. Ivory pearl interiors had this version inspired by the Barcelona Chair for an eye watering £310 a piece. Incredibly smart and with the sole aim to taunt me it had been styled with the Graham and Greene bobble lamp. Made for each other it seemed to be saying - just not for you! Anyhow I convinced myself that I preferred the Charlston one anyway so it did not matter and continued my largely futile search for a discounted Charlston or look alike.

All this while my trusty and reliable Ebay version patiently hung around waiting for me to get around to the decision I was fated to make. Until finally one afternoon I happened to be browsing around the shops and lo and behold what do I see but my Ebay bedside table, I mean an identical version of it, being retailed by M&S Home, only it was priced at £199 a piece. A premium of a whopping £54 over what I was getting it at online. Instinctive shopper psychology took over instantly and I went home thrilled at having found myself a bargain and ordered the tables off ebay that very evening. I was clearly on a roll because I happened to also get £25 gift voucher from ebay that day. So great result all in all!

Every once in a while though I go around to the Laura Ashley website and wistfully look at the Charlston table. But I do always come home quite contentedly to my reliable, smart, (cheaper) ebay ones!

Plum equals Posh

After having watched about a 100 by now utterly indistinguishable episodes of '60 Minute Makeover' 'How not to decorate' 'House Doctor' etc I have colours like plum, taupe, teal, duck egg etc. coming out of my ears and way too often out of my mouth.

Well for the un-initiated plum is just another name for purple. As a word it serves two purposes - it sounds terribly posh, and for those who hate the thought of the colour purple in their rooms its a conveniently ambiguous term for someone selling a design scheme to you.

As it happens the colour 'plum' or 'purple', if you prefer, entered our home when I decided that my master bedroom needed, as a final touch in an ongoing decorating effort, large statement bedside lamps. I had some throws and cushions made up on the cheap in India in a nice purple and gold fabric and we had copperish, silverish organza curtains which were quite a statement. So I decided I needed a bit more purple in the room and lamps were the best way to add the colour in.

I had noticed that glass bobble lamps seemed to have been making an appearance consistently on high street shelves (John Lewis, Habitat, Heals etc) for a few months now but in most cases they seemed rather pretentious or just plain boring (apart from not being purple). Until I happened to spot this lamp on ebay.

Answering quite literally to the description purple glass ball lamp on ebay it drew my attention for being stylish and contemporary and yet classic enough to not risk becoming last season's fad very soon. The lovely black silk shade really gave it a classy touch. The attractive price tag at £45 (including shipping) helped even more.

Further research revealed that this was probably inspired by Graham and Greene's original (much pricier at £89 per lamp) version alongside. Beautifully styled in this photo with the vintage telephone. What I happened to pick up in the G&G picture was how thick and solid the metallic silver base was - it gave a sense of balance to the top heavy design. Couldn't quite spot the thick base in the Ebay pic and that quickly put a question mark on the cheaper cousin.



And then appeared contender number two a lovely sleek table lamp by Dar, called the Dillon lamp and also available in some really bright and fruity colours like yellow and orange - with a thin and tall purple glass base and a fabric shade in the identical colour. The pics will almost have you think that the shade and base are all made of one piece of glass. Which I am sure they are not but its a beautiful lamp all the same. Available at a variety of prices in several online lighting stores its currently available from www.lights4living.com on sale at a rather attractive £48.27.


I have to say though that the option that finally made it into our bedroom was one that I found online but bought in a store. The NEXT plum bobble lamp (on the right hand side in the photo) stands tall at a proud 60cms and will make a great statement whether in the bedroom or living room. The shade in the picture looks like a quite dark purple but in reality is a much more subtle and pleasant colour. At £45 pounds each it didn't break the bank either. I was also delighted to see that it has a lovely thick metallic silver base just like the Graham and Greene lamp automatically giving it style and solidity. But probably what I liked the most were the quite quirky bobbles in increasing sizes - like a fat old lady settling in comfortably onto a sofa - making it just the right combination of stylish and fun.

And the absolute final ace in the pack ofcourse was the fact that it was called 'The Plum Bobble Lamp" not purple - obviously I was only having the poshest one of them all!

Shit or get off the pot!

So what HAVE I been doing since I first posted on my blog. The weekends are spent doing loads of different fun things with my husband and are lovely but the weekdays when he is at work and I am at home are the times that need accounting for. So lets see

- 30% of my time is spent sleeping (like most of us),
- another 15% cooking (that's right I am discovering my domesticated side),
- 5% miscellanneous and unmentionables!!!!
- and a whopping 50% it turns out is spent on surfing websites on interior design and home decor.

That sounds rather bleak so I must add that this figure includes time spent on pursuits which spin off from the web surfing i.e. watching TV shows of a similar ilk, shopping for the home products I spot online, sometimes preceded by strategic influencing of 'the husband' on the need for another set of such and such, and when that fails thinking up clever DIY ideas to make it myself.

Once I was over the shock of that statistical deduction and the purely coincidental but simultaneous conclusion about the dire unpopularity and frankly sheer uselessness of my blog in its current form - I realised in its truest sense the meaning of the famous saying 'Shit or get off the pot'.

Oooh pressure not nice!!

Anyhow rather than walking off into bloggers oblivion I figured maybe I could write about what I actually found out there in my many online and other meanders. That way if I did pester my friends with links to my blog at least they would not have to be nice about my dreary attempts at trying to be writer - they could actually get some use out of my web trawls should they decide to redecorate their homes.

So I did a quick mental check on my fulfilled as well as unrequited decor loves of these past few months. As it happens my rather long-winded approach would typically involve a long list of about 10 possibilities. This would then be followed by mulling, sleeping over, rechecking, fretting as I lost a couple of options coz the sites ran out of stock while I mulled. This moved on in about 3 weeks (i.e. if I hadn't gone off the idea by then) to presenting a shortlist of about 3 options, in a well thought through financing conversation, to said husband. And finally based on the strength of the grimace on his face sort of making up my mind on what we were getting. Tedious as it sounds just by virtue of being so long and indecisive the process made it neccessary that I save photos and links in a word file.

So long and short of it I think I may actually be in business since I have loads of material stashed away! Yippeee!!

Now to kick off general lassitude and actually upload my first post! As ever easier said than done!

3 and half months on

Probably no different from millions of new bloggers I too spent a good amount of time wondering if I should start my own blog or not. I deeply analyzed my motivations for doing so, and after much rumination and having convinced myself that it was only a means of self expression and not a secret urge to unveil hitherto hidden talent - I courageously put up my first post.

I thought of a clever title (you know the kinds that would sound good if my blog ever got published in the real world - never hurts to be prepared for fame!) read it five times over tweaking the witty bits with each read, made sure I had been self deprecating enough to be interesting but not so much that I came across as a loser and finally clicked on the link that said post.

Job done - brilliant - first attempt at self expression successful. And now onto the nailbiting wait to see if anybody actually wanted to read what I had written.

As was plainly inevitable nobody did - I checked the next day - and the next and the one after - in fact I even came back 2 weeks later. But no - no sign of droves of delighted readers sending in appreciative comments and waiting with bated breadth for my next post.

Considering that I myself had never seriously followed a blog I have to say my idea of what to expect was mostly fictitious. Also my extreme self conciousness meant that I hadn't actually forwarded the link to anyone.

So 3 and half months later with much reflection and more self analyses I have figured out that unless I harass my friends by forwarding them links to my blog or gather the guts to ask someone how this is actually done, nothing short of a miracle can ensure that someone actually reads what I am writing.

Hmmm very interesting thought indeed - I mean if nobody is going to read this then I can actually write whatever the hell I want. But then if nobody is going to read this then do I really want to write it at all..... quite a conundrum!!!

'So what do you do Anita'

I just got married, to a British man, moved cities to be with my husband and have entirely of my own choosing quit my job of ten years and decided to take a break. So as strict definitions go and much as I hate to admit it I am now a housewife.

Its funny really - I have truly looked forward to this time of total freedom and lack of responsibility. Most people envy my life of leisure. And yet the honest truth is I don't really know what to do with myself. Not just that actually I am not quite sure who I am anymore.

This becomes most apparent in social situations conversing with people I haven't met before and I end up groping around for things to talk about. I find my safe haven tends to be to talk a bit about what my husband does and then get quickly onto the subject of 'Oh we just got married'. That gives me about 10 minutes of describing my fairy tale wedding in India. Inevitably there will be the people who have visited India or are planning a visit and that gets me through another 10 odd minutes and then you can move on to the next person and have the same conversation again.

The longer sit down lunches or dinners are tougher. You have only two people that you can flit between (or at best 4 but then you have to include numbers 1 or 2 so repetition isn't an option). Recently at a fairly posh lunch my husband and I were invited to (corporate hospitality at a famous rugby venue) a retired Army Colonel on my right, tried to engage me in conversation on sport. Trying to be sensitive to my fairly diffident but upfront admission to being a rugby virgin - the Colonel deftly moved to cricket - I mean which Indian doesn't fancy cricket. Well as it happens I don't - so we struggled through a few more painful half sentences - one of which unbelievably involved me saying something as ridiculous as 'Oh I have never been sporty I much prefer to dance....'.

Embarassingly gawky statements like that give me bad dreams typically for at least a month after the fact. But they do have the advantage of being very effective conversation stiflers if ever you needed one.

Well on this particular occasion it was then up to the person on my left to try to engage me and he decided to enquire about what my interests were - 'perhaps I enjoyed gardening or cooking?' he ventured!

Where I grew up gardening was something your 'maali' gardener did and cooking was something the cook did. Having lived three years in England I was able to pass off my two afternoons of vigorous cutting back of the hedge and wild creepers under close observation of my husband as a budding interest in gardening and my reading out recipes from a British cookbook to my cook/maid (yes i am lucky enough to have one in England that too an Indian one) as my housewifely instincts finally blooming. But even that got me through only about 6 or so minutes.

So inevitably on that and other occasions conversations begin to meander hopelessly or worse still go embarrassingly pear shaped and I find myself blurting out 'I worked for Unilever you know for 10 years before I got married'. There is an immediate and gratifying shift in tone and mood as people around me mentally switch gears . I then proceed to have a civilised but incredibly tedious conversation about what I used to do, the excitement of having worked in markets as different as India and the UK, Unilever's culture or performance as a company, blah, blah, blah....

How did I let this happen to me how did I let myself become my job? Actually no hang on that's not true when I did have a job that was the assured and stable part of my identity. I did not feel so much the need to dwell on it - it provided the happy take off ground to be able to talk about other things - not spectacularly intellectual things but an interesting mix nonetheless.

Now though I just sit there in trepidation waiting for dreaded question no 3 'So what do you do Anita?'

I have to clarify though this is less likely to happen if the people in question are Indian Indian - and by that I mean born and brought up in India (like me). I do still use the crutch of dropping in the fact that I worked with Unilever, or with the inevitable 'Oh did you say you knew so and so', comparing notes on the educational institution one went to. But that's just the Indian way of establishing your place in the pecking order early in the conversation. A few facts about pedigree and a basic framework of evaluation has been established. Then if you choose to discuss how property markets in Bombay are responding to the global recession or trash the latest Bollywood film it doesn't really matter.

With younger Indians there's even something kind of cool about having had the guts to take a break from the rat race. Not having worked for a bank helps even more since it rules out the possibility that you were sacked. With the older generation though having quit a good job with a well known company prompts paternalistic concern - our parents generation of middle class Indians are the true upholders of women's emancipation and education in India (we merely reap the fruits of their investments in us). It distresses them to think that a talented and intelligent girl may be at risk of losing her independence or self respect.

But the difficult truth is by way of marriage I have committed myself to a life in England now. That too in a city different from the one I spent the past three years growing roots in. All my Indian friends and hence the Indian acquaintances I may have met through them are at least a substantial train ride away and in a scary sort of way already part of a different life. This is a country where while in my case the cook may still do the cooking my husband is the 'maali' and would be quite thrilled if I chose to take an interest in the garden beyond wild hacking under supervision.

I suspect I will be fumbling through many more dinners and lunches of fearing the dreaded question before I finally find an answer I am truly comfortable with.

Until then lets just hope enough British people are planning holidays to India or have just been!