Home comforts

I'm still decorating my imaginary flat. I aspire to the sort of home that looks like a cross between a junk shop and a cliched British pub. You know, the kind with 'Ye Olde' in its name. The sort of place where people wander around just looking at all the odd bits and pieces hung on the walls or tucked into nooks and crannies. "A dust trap", my grandma would say, but I'll either be hiring a cleaner, in which case it won't be my problem, or just cultivating the dust. Dust is good for you anyway. It prevents asthma. Admittedly only as you're growing up. If you've already got it, dust will pretty much be the bane of your life, making my imaginary flat a death trap full of wheezing asthmatics groping blindly for inhalers.

Accidental elimination of the airway-challenged aside, I am genuinely in favour of the kind of home where an empty surface is an anathema. Impressed as I am sometimes by houses which look like show homes, they never really feel truly homey to me. I don't want to feel obliged to take off my shoes when I enter, even if I usually do so by choice anyway. Coffee tables are calling out to be a repository for stray magazines and junk, the little gaps in front of books on shelves are surely designed to be filled with trinkets and oddities, and the correct place to put the paraphenalia of bits and pieces one sheds from one's person on getting home is wherever one happens to pause first. For me, a clutter of decoration and belongings is what elevates a space from merely being the place where I live, to being my home. It's comforting to me to be surrounded by that imprint of myself and my fellow residents, rather than perching awkwardly in an over-sanitised room, terrified of putting something down in the wrong place or spilling a drink. I want my home to say something about who I am, even if what it says is "My owner is a slattern, an overgrown child and a hater of asthmatics".