My dining room table has arrived!!!
The family heirloom table has been returned to its rightful owners, to be replaced with one that I, and then eventually my children and my grandchildren, will sit and dine at, share stories at, accidentally brick into bedrooms, etc.
It is gigantic.
I attempt to help the Table Delivery Man carry it into the Cottage. It is enormously heavy – as heavy as one of those extreme metal bands, eg def leppard. My arms are built for pleasuring women, not for lifting heavy tables from vans, whereas his only job in the world is lifting heavy tables from vans – he does it several times a day and indeed probably has a degree in it from Thames Valley University. We stagger through the doorway into the kitchen. The walls seem to shake as we rest it with a gentle crash on the brick floor.
As he goes to fetch the legs, I feel a pang of conscience. I have spent several hundred pounds on a dining room table when there are children dying in the Lebinon.
I am a shameful person and will go to hell. Then I realise that without a proper dining room table you cannot have dinner parties discussing things like how bad it is that children are dying in the Lebinon, so I feel a bit better and that I have done my bit. The Table Delivery Man returns with the legs, which are like matchsticks, but on a planet where matchsticks are really really big and thick, and have metal bolts on them to attach them to tabletops.
He fits the legs.
We then attempt to turn the table the right way up, which is a fiasco. Carrying it upright was bad enough, but attempting to both lift and turn it makes me look even weedier by a factor of about seventeen. They probably share stories about this at the Table Delivery Social Club, in between chatting about van capacity and the use (or non-use) of mats. We manoeuvre it into position, which involves my end staying in exactly the same place, and his end manoeuvring.
He gives me a ‘well done’ smile, like a local newsreader reporting on the delivery of a new Sunshine Coach. Eight chairs complete the picture. I resolve to have a dinner party ASAP.
