A Philosophical Interlude – Guilt May Lessen

Thursday 19th November 2015

I was very usefully briefed some time ago by Anthony Mottram, ‘consultant’ of Prague, first met by me in 1970 at the housemaster’s tea-party, when, according to Anthony, I fell off my chair from daintiness and politeness. You’d have thought I’d remember if it had actually happened but AM never fails to mention it. So we’ve bickered away for 45 years. However, the great news is – so I was briefed by Anthony Mottram – that Thomas Picketty (do you remember him? He upset the monied classes by producing a huge book in which he claimed that the gap between the rich and poor was ever growing and an outrage and the only way to put a stop to it would be taxing capital) – well, it’s all rubbish. The so-called gap between rich and poor is much as it has always been. The figures are distorted by the large numbers of new workers coming into the labour market in emerging economies. So there. We can carry on as before.

The problem of money is not quite solved though. Anthony Mottram said he is checking the markets every few minutes. I am too. The more you have the more anxious you become. Is your decor good enough? Could it be better? A troubling landscape of infinite spending opens up. When I was young, I seemed to know exactly what I wanted for the home and, with careful, lethal waiting for the Sales, how to get it. Now there is only some remote unknowable perfection. Take my dining room mat, for instance. It needs renewing after 18 years. I could have ordered another piece of seagrass months ago for a few hundred. But somehow I feel I must rise higher as to my dining room mat. I’ve been to Chelsea Harbour. I’m looking at water rush at £120 a square metre (in fact, now I think of it, where’s that sample?). I’m contemplating a Queen Mother blue woven paper or a novel vinyl product.

Please help.

Woven Paper Samples for my New Dining Room Mat in Queen Mother Blue and Brown

More Samples: A Woven Vinyl or Nylon from Bolon

 

Posted Thursday, November 19, 2015 under Adrian Edge day by day.

4 comments

  1. Laura Malcolm says:

    Why not go for the tangerine wool carpet you installed in the previous official home? You didn’t speak to me for weeks when I described it as orange.

  2. Joshua Baring says:

    Handwoven from Portugual. The only way to go. They do the palaces: http://www.tapetesbeiriz.pt/#!rugs/c187

  3. Adrian Edge says:

    It was a marmalade shade, massively reduced from Arding and Hobbs. It was supposed to be a first-class Wilton but as soon as laid showed an intolerance of verticality. The vertical sections on the stairs, where no foot falls, developed holes and tufts. I wonder if any carpet before or since has behaved like this. I do have a tangerine rug in my drawing room now in memory of the marmalade stair carpet in the former official residence

  4. Adrian Edge says:

    Am thrilled to have another website to look at.

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