Tops and Bottoms

They say that it takes two to tango, and so it was this weekend, as I was minding my own business, enjoying a quiet cup of tea, when suddenly there is a loud bang and I find that I am moving. First I am unexpectedly leaning back, without warning. Then when I upright myself and lean forwards, I am left at an angle, and somewhat askew. Something is wrong. Then, before I have a chance to investigate further, the wheels come off entirely and I am placed at such an extreme angle that I fall out of my comfortable chair and onto the floor.

Yes, my chair has broken. The self-same chair which I blogged about not so long ago (See: Executive Leather) fell to pieces with a bang, dumping me out onto the floor in a most unwelcome fashion. Of course it turns out that "not so long ago" when I bought the chair was actually January 2007, so it's out of guarantee. My chair is gone, and I need a new one.

Temporarily making do with a fold-up wooden chair which I keep on hand for just such an occasion, I once again perused the Argos catalogue to notice that actually they do still sell my chair. For some reason it's more expensive now, a costly £29.99 instead of last year's £24.99, but I expect that'll be due to the increasing worldwide price of the luxurious and entirely genuine, perhaps, leather seat which forms such a large part of the whole chair thing.

But the top half of my old chair is still quite alright, really. It's really just the hydraulics and the struts on the bottom which have fallen to pieces. And that's when it hit me. All I need is a new bottom.

Off to Argos I went (eventually), forking over the required £30 (which I paid for once again with Nectar points - hooray!) to be served by a nice young lady, probably fresh out of school, not yet old enough to look very interested in anything, and with a name badge which revealed that her name was "Kylie". I realise that we are generations apart. Me, old enough to remember when 'Neighbours' first started on British television, and the prediction that in the coming years there would be lots of parents naming their new babies 'Kylie'. Her, the first wave of grown-ups from that Neighbours generation.

Kylie handed me my leather goods, and I took them home. That may be the only time in my life that I ever get to use those words in anything I write, but I'm glad that I did.

Once home, I thought back to those heady days of January 2007 when I assembled this first chair. I remember how much of a nuisance it was to get the top together. And since all I really needed here in May 2008 was a new bottom, I decided to put the old top on the new bottom. It was much faster. And now I have a spare top which I can put in the shed to store in case I should ever need to replace it one day.

The long and the short of this rather dull (but supremely well-written, and hence fascinating) story, is this. Same old top, brand new bottom, on which to place my same old bottom. Order has returned to the world.