A Fabric Project Prompts A Visit To A Haberdashers
When Julia woke up at the crack of dawn, she already had her mind set on one aim for this bright, as yet unsullied, day - new curtains. Mentally punching the air - Yes! - a brilliant fabric for the front room. It wasn't that the present occupants were worn or in need of a quick dry clean. She was just bored by them. They'd been installed for six months or so and all the novelty had really worn off. They should be gone, and gone soon. What was wrong with them? Unclear. But it was somewhere in the area of Waffled Apricot not really making a sufficiently notable enough design statement.
Now she'd envisaged this tantalising prospect, the hunt needed planning for. Where to source that soon to be delicious fabric? She imagined she'd start off at Randall's, because you had to begin somewhere. But she preferred to shop local anyway, because of the greater opportunities to cause outrage it provided. So much easier in a village than in a town, where everyone professed not to care what you did. Her surname in Brimmingham, however, had become a rude word on the street. Notorious enough for all local shop assistants to know where she lived, and be able to recite the address off by heart.
'Lets give the family run haberdashers a chance before casting the net wider, or to the 'net', shall we?'
However, she held out little or no hope of finding anything suitable. It had never happened before. Randall's staid fabric range she'd once described to their face as - 'a capital IT prefaced by a large SH.' Of course they knew their local market; ultra conventional and conservative. The type of people to whom a boldly sculpted damask was as racy as it got. Even if this were to be executed with a degree of heightened irony, it was simply not the emphasis she was seeking to embolden here.
One look at her front room would tell you why. She'd not deign to line even her knicker drawer with a twee chintz. To say the senses were challenged by her interiors would be to downplay the effect. Provoked, assaulted or blinded were nearer. Colours and patterns did not so much riot, but raged. Crudely mustered in a fully fledged war. Explosions of expressionistic splashes spreading artfully across a sofa, fought a battle for supremacy with a wallpaper marshalled with stripes, and the jazzed up rectilinear design of the carpet. The constant visual jitterbug, generating an optical disturbance worthy of Bridget Riley.
Julia absolutely loved it, so certain was she that it was unique. No one else could pull off such a bravura use of ocular excess. She was very surprised no one had contacted her to do a Sunday magazine photo shoot on it yet. Having sent pictures and info to a old school acquaintance at the The Telegraph.... several times.
'Note to self - you'll have to badger the bugger - phone them!
There were no places of peace and serenity to contrast against the actively strident surroundings. Julia thought those served no useful aesthetic purpose at all. That was the source of her discontent with the existing curtains, they were far too meek. Just not working hard enough. Without needing to read anything on the subject, she'd instinctively grasped the ethos of 'maximalist' design, and gone way way beyond.
Minimalism, not without some justification she believed, had become too all pervasive these days. It was up there with flock wallpaper as an interior design tragedy. Stripped of character, individuality or soul, it was now the default choice for every empty headed, clueless thirty something who wanted to appear effortlessly modern. With the emphasis being on effortless. It was lazy. Any propensity to be cutting edge well and truly blunted by being over a century too late.
Julia preferred totemic collisions to tastefully coordinated beige, off white or tonal grey ensembles. As she sat pertly in bed planning the splendid day ahead, emblazoned across Julia's baggy Day Glo Orange night shirt, and picked out in blobby sequined letters for added emphasis, was the phrase -
' Kelly Hoppen, can go fuck herself'!' -
Once up and dressed she hurriedly left her house and turned the corner. Two streets further down she swiveled left. Half way up, the flaking Sanderson's paintwork of the late Georgian bay windows of Randall's came into view. Her expectations remained low. The assistant Ms Treadwell stood impassive behind the polished mahogany counter. Greeting Julia with the practiced blank visage of understated politeness. She smiled weakly, whilst inwardly her heart was sinking
'Why did it have to be me? Why her, today of all days?'
She knew of Julia, oh yes, everyone knew of Julia. Goodness, what a pain this woman could be. She didn't understand why Julia even bothered asking. When had they ever had what she wanted? Nevertheless, she'd make you go through their banks of fabric sample binders, searching for a distinctive fabric, that would not be found.
'Good Morning, Ms Goodall-Smillie, how are you today?'
'Fine, fine. This morning..... I'm looking for curtain fabric, no brocades, velvets, or damasks, non or your Laura Ashley style nostalgic tat, or derivatives thereof. I know this might be a bit, just a bit, of a forlorn hope. But do you have anything bold, and I do mean bold, either in colour, design or concept. This would be highly highly preferable. Had anything, anything, new in, lately.....ever?'
If Julia's conversation became peppered with repeated words, she was usually teetering on the edge of her very worst behaviour. The emphasis infusing every sentence with a sarcasm, not lost at all on Ms Treadwell. Particularly as Julia leaned in towards the hapless shop assistant and practically spit her request at the poor woman's spectacles. Ms Treadwell flickered her eyelids, startled, intimidated, the too close proximity triggering her phobia and hence flustering her.
She was used to a refined, but distant civility, often concealing its sense of superior entitlement beneath a sharply pleated skirt. Brimmingham was the sort of village that kept quiet about its spiteful authoritarian leanings, preferring to conceal them underneath the highly polished walnut veneer of homely gentility. Ms Treadwell's eyes popped wide open at Julia's head-on confrontational manner. Then she took a step back, recomposed her expression, hardening it to the best pinched withering look she could currently muster. Today, today maybe she did have something to stop Ms Julia Goodall-Smillie's train in its tracks.
'Actually, I may have I believe the very thing. If you'll just excuse me for one moment'
Randall's like most haberdashers received unsolicited fabric promotion folders, almost on a daily basis. And likewise, almost daily they were quickly passed on to Beryl, who, as a local person with a charitable disposition and the time to indulge it, made shoulder bags or rucksacks out of them. Donating her recycled creations to the homeless refuge in Compton Norton, the nearest town. As a consequence many a drug addled war veteran, lodged temporarily in a defunct Debenham's doorway, also sported a bag made from a patchwork melange of high end fabrics. Snuggled up alongside a smelly wet dog.
In yesterday's delivery had arrived a folder from a new company, London based. Very trendy and hence distasteful in its unhinged desire to offend, called Retinal Hemorrhage. She'd quickly skimmed it quietly confident there was nothing suitable for a Randall's customer. Then threw it into the bin for offcuts and end of roll fabrics. From where she now fished it out. Perhaps this would be a god send for her confrontational customer. The one with that fake hyphenated name and less than savoury origins - Wolverhampton, so she'd heard. The designs, bold yet disturbing, she presented with tentative triumphalism to Ms Julia Goodall-Smillie.
'How about these?'
Julia's eyebrows arched very high.
Ms Treadwell looked alarmed, unable to read whether that was a good sign or not.
Curtains My Dear, Curtains
EPISODE 2 - There Is An Art To Choosing When You're Drunk
Will be posted Friday 14th January 2022
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