Which as anyone who has had the misfortune to study Latin at school will be aware means table. This is the story of a table: (mensae). So Mensa Mensae Mensam….
A few days ago a friend was sorting out the garage and decided to get rid of a kitchen table, a heavy sturdy table with a tiled surface.
Collette saw the potential of this as a much better surface on which to use her sewing machine than her present table which has been severely eroded by the cat using each of the legs in turn as a scratching post and has lost a certain degree of structural integrity as a result. The “new” table arrived on Saturday afternoon.
Before we put its legs back on we had to clear space in Collette’s studio which meant moving a variety of items into the kitchen first moving dishes etc off the expanding table, doing the washing up and extending the table.
The new table was duly be-legged and stood up in the middle of the studio. This left relatively little room for manoeuvre and so we started dismantling the plastic shelving in the corner only to discover it was next to the telephone socket and had also developed a complicated relationship with various leads and power cables running from the power socket on the other side of the room, supplying the router, cordless phone base unit and wifi computer printer. This meant moving a chest of drawers ( drawers, which had to be taken out in order) into that corner. This chest (sans drawers) promptly shed one of its castors in protest and required a cork to be wedged underneath it instead ( thankfully we somehow have managed to acquire an abundance of these)
The plastic shelving units started off being stood in the hallway where they teetered under a growing pile of displaced items as the rest of the surfaces in the studio were “systematically” cleared in order to move more furniture around.
A tall cabinet with small flat drawers was tentatively lowered down the rickety stairs into the basement where after the lugging around a couple of heavy table-top etching presses it has settled in with only a minor amount of disruption, one sheet of broken glass and the generation of two bin bags of rubbish.
One plastic shelving unit was eventually dispatched to the first floor where after moving the sofa it conveniently hides the patched hole in the wall left by the builders that came round last week. A second shelving unit has finally found a home in the bedroom (more corks required) after a brief sortie to the basement where it didn’t really gel with its neighbours. The small white table that was its predecessor has made its way down to the hall.
Sunday dawned on a bleak landscape of piled up stuff on most flat surfaces of the house.
The bathroom resisted all attempts at permanent assimilation of refugee furniture whereas the kitchen succumbed. After moving the combination cooker/microwave, decanting several cupboards, and coming perilously close to accidentally defrosting the freezer the final shelving unit managed to sneak in and make itself at home in the corner, where it is happily creaking under the various trays and tins that previously resided in the oven. A quick trip to Argos for two wheelie vegetable racks solved the tricky problem of where to store the provisions for 3 extremely picky cats with widely different tastes and also for the comprehensive biscuit collection that we appear to have acquired.
An evening trip to the off-license replenished our (not exactly dwindling, but you can’t be too sure) supply of corks and a set of heavy-duty castors has been ordered to facilitate the final manoeuvres of the new table.
Surfaces are starting to re-emerge from the debris , and whilst it may be weeks before we can find anything again it is indeed a very nice table!