Ian McMillan: The comfort of a long standing love affair with ‘S’

I DON’T want to shock anybody but I’d like to confess to a love affair that’s been going on for years; we’ll call the object of my affection “S”. S is soft and welcoming. S is constant and unchanging. S sometimes gives me unexpected gifts: last week it was a ten piece and a TV remote control. Yes, I may as well say it, I may as well get it out in the open: S is our settee. The one in the front room. The one I loll on whenever I can.

Oh, I love our settee. I like the way that, when I sit on it, it gives and sags ever so slightly in a welcoming kind of way as if to say “Hello Ian, where’ve you been? I’ve missed you” even if I’ve only been to the kitchen to put the kettle on. I respond, of course, with the middle-aged groan that blokes utter when they sink onto the settee. Some people call it tiredness, but I call it passion. I sit on the settee and after a moment I put my feet up, resting them on the arm. Bliss. Sheer, unadulterated bliss.

It’s always a settee, by the way, never a sofa. A sofa sounds like the sort of thing you might have in a lounge rather than a front room. A sofa sounds less welcoming, somehow; a sofa is like a settee with a posh hat on, a Hyacinth Bouquet of furniture.

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I reckon this settee-affection started when I was a lad. Our settee at home took on many roles in my childhood. I hid behind it when Doctor Who was on, even though my dad told me that the Daleks were just “dustbins with sticks sticking out”. I used it as a shelter when I played cowboys and Indians, ducking out of sight when my mam came in with the washing and shouting “Get back, Crazy Horse!” which isn’t the kind of thing you often get to shout to a woman in a pinny with a basket full of pants. Maybe it was a mistake to use one of the antimacassars as a bandana, too, but I was young and reckless in those days. As I got older I could lie on it to read my Biggles books, sometimes contorting and twisting as the action got more exciting until I was almost sitting upside-down with my legs sticking up the settee-back and my head nearly touching the floor. As I got older still I would spread my homework out on the settee and balance a drink on the arm and drop my pen down the back until the settee became a combination of workstation and student bedsit.

So now, although I enjoy a nice easy chair, I love a settee. I reckon there are a couple of rules that settees have to follow, though. If possible, a settee should never be new, it must be bought pre-aged, like whisky. That’s because when you get a new settee people always say “Be careful with that drink!” and “Sit properly on that new settee” as though slouching or slumping will somehow break it. Also, the settee shouldn’t be slippery. You know the kind of settee I’m referring to: they’re often off-white and they’re made of faux-leatherette which really means they’re plastic and when you sit on them they make terrible trumping noises just before you slither off them onto the floor.

Anyway, I’ve been sitting on this hard chair too long. S is calling me…