Ugliness is merely commonplace; deformity is sublime...

...all the comforts of home...

I'm somewhat of a fan of abandoned furniture. Having passed many contented hours gloating over other people's casually discarded home decor mistakes, I regularly thank god for Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen and the plethora of home improvement shows peppering the TV schedules

One of the more esoteric pleasures of living in the city, as far as I'm concerned, this precarious impermanence is something from which I derive an inexplicable degree of comfort...a feeling similar to the 'there-there' pleasure of eating mashed potatoes or rice pudding. Comfort food for the soul!

As I sit here on my minimalist black leather 3-seater sofa, across from the brushed-steel and birch room-divider which houses my DVD collection, I indulge in a brief but satisfying fantasy of how nice this sofa will one day look, occupying its own small rectangle of pavement next to the council's huge, filthy bins;

Perhaps it'll be blessed with a couple of splintered or missing legs, or a long gash in the arm through which its cheap, flammable white nylon-fibre guts will bulge, an artistic study in monochrome...As I brush off a couple of cat hairs, I picture it, already framing it in my mind's eye, resting at a angle against a pile of shiny black rubbish bags... 

Amidst the abundance of Elizabeth Frinks, the plethora of council-sponsored murals and 'interesting' bits of wrought iron on plinths with which Tower Hamlets is uniquely stuffed, the street decor which unfailingly warms my heart a little is a forlorn sagging, slighly damp example of last year's Ikea good taste, now turfed out like a Christmas puppy on January 1st.

I'll always spare a sympathetic thought for the hapless, once-beloved, 'must-have' sofa; it's not their fault, after all. The inability to match a new Terracotta colour scheme in the lounge might be their only crime... 

Luckily, now that Spring is almost here, there are increased opportunities for stumbling on someone's old discarded sofa, some bottle green velour excrescence with wood-veneer curlicues on the arms and overstuffed cushions so ugly that it makes you pause and silently thank the gods of taste that it's not squatting like a great green toad in your living room, or a badly misjudged cream corner unit that proved no match for 3 kids...
 
And this year I'm pleased to see that the annual Spring time clearouts have kick-started a sudden mini-rash of abandoned furniture around Hackney Road...All within a 5 minute walking radius of my house, in the last 4 days I've enjoyed 3 chairs, 2 sofas, a broken table and, today to cap it off, a toilet...

To my profound embarrassment, I couldn't help but notice that it's a cleaner, bigger and better quality loo - and has a wooden seat to boot - than the one in my flat!

Oh the humanity!