Practical. That's what a toilet seat is. You know its function. A place to rest yourself before, during, or after a busy day.
So I had no difficulty in joining Herself in a bit of shopping around this afternoon as it involved something practical like a toilet seat.
Our other one was fancy. Too impractical, in fact. Where it sacrificed practicality for fanciness it met rust, and where it met rust it seized, and where it seized it eventually broke.
My own posterior being unfussy, I am unfazed by the absense of a toilet seat, but the rest of the family were too quickly disappearing down the pan and so one had to be had. I approved of the mission.
So it was with some surprise -- although experience should have warned me in advance -- that I greeted the suggestion:
"Let's look at the household section."
Among the household section items were various pieces of packing crates reassembled into designer furniture. There were clocks made from scrap metal the scrap-metal merchants obviously rejected. Picture frames that looked like the bin truck had run over them. And there were ornamental bits and pieces that were trying to be practical in a slightly cream coloured way.
"Oh look!" Herself cooed at a three tiered cake stand -- the kind that one puts the most elaborate of biscuits and tartlets onto when the parish priest comes to call, but hides away in the event the Relieving Officer sends a representative to the house. "You shall have to carry it in the car," she said.
I wondered briefly if this involved wearing the toilet seat like a horse collar, but it transpired that other came in a cardboard box. I daintily held the cake stand (making sure its ornamental finial wasn't pointing at my eyeball in case we had to stop suddenly) on my lap on the drive home. It had little pottery doily edges.
About an hour later, we noticed the yoke was kind of leaning over, like something underneath was melted.
"Do you think that's crooked?" I asked.
"Hmmm," was the reply. It was the kind of "Hmmm" which said, "And why didn't you spot that in the shop, Mr. There's-Another-One-There-in-the-Front-of-the-Display-Lookit?"
So I have to figure out how to straighten up the thing. The middle tier has an off-centre hole.
Ironic, really, as the toilet seat fitted perfectly.
