Fifty Shades of Beige

When I was a boy, every other weekend – or so it felt – my family would spend a rainy Sunday afternoon wandering around a carpet showroom.

To this day, a row of majestic, towering rolled-up offcuts has the power to overawe me; the heady perfume of formaldehyde to set my hippocampus jangling; the electrostatically-charged atmosphere generated by opposingly-polarised artificial fibres to ... well, you get the picture.

The thing about childhood memories is that as soon as you start bringing them up in front of other people who were actually there, you generally discover that they were completely false.

So whether we actually went to Kingsbury Carpets quite as often as it felt we went or not, carpets en masse send me right back to the state of a bored child chasing my brother up and down the aisles, hiding in between vast swathes of Axminster ... and off I go again.

We, the Sicilies, are still in the midst of buying our new house. We are waiting for it to be finished and hope to move in next month.

A word of advice – when considering the choice between a new build and a used/second hand/pre-owned house (delete to taste), bear in mind that for all their upsides, new builds generally don’t come with floor coverings. So unless you like the feel of bare concrete underfoot – perhaps you are going for “Gaza Strip” decor? – you are going to have to invest in carpet.

A lot of carpet.

In our case, as it turns out, several thousand pounds-worth of carpet.

Now, as a pedant of the first order, I have always had trouble using the suffix “-worth” as a synonym for “cost” or “priced at”. That seems to me to be at best a lazy and at worst sinister conflation of the ideas of value and price. I’ve bought carpet (and vinyl – itself apparently an upmarket synonym for “lino” these days) that cost thousands of pounds, but as to whether it was “worth” it, only time will tell.

And let me tell you, carpet: I am going to be subjecting you to some pretty exacting standards when I think about the other things I could have done with that money.

Back when I was a boy, the carpet warehouse seemed a veritable kaleidoscope of colour and texture. Indeed, in history, carpets were status symbols and ways for rulers to display their magnificence.  

And yet in our shrunken world, we are reduced to the choice between the titular fifty shades of beige. Yes, I bet you were expecting more sex and less carpet when you saw that headline, weren't you?

How can anyone reasonably choose between carpets that look and feel identical? When you can see two indistinguishable carpets “worth” £8 per square metre and £30 per square metre?

OK, I can just about grasp the difference between wool and synthetics, between pile lengths, between looped and ... um... the other kind. But how can anyone choose between so many options that are so similar?

The man in the carpet shop explained to Elvira and I that, in these economically depressed times, manufacturers have to play safe. If they produce anything too out of the ordinary, they risk being stuck with a load of stock they can’t shift and thence going out of business. And that competitive pressure actually drives them all to reduce choice and produce endless tiny variants of the same few basic designs.

An interesting lesson in unfettered competition leading to market failure, don’t you think? If I want a purple carpet with green stripes in it, I SIMPLY CAN’T GET ONE BECAUSE NOBODY MAKES THEM.

And underlay! Don’t talk to me about underlay! “The silent killer” it should be called, because as soon as you think you have a vague idea how much carpeting a room is going to cost – ah! – don’t forget that you need underlay, which itself can cost as much as the carpet. Bloody underlay.

So after a painstaking selection process (more painstaking on Elvira’s part, I should add – my role was largely restricted to saying “yes, THAT one”) we duly settled upon our limestone 521s, our 7B minks and 1866 soft biscuits.

In the bathroom though we went KERRRAYZEEE though: we’re getting “liquorice and bubblegum” striped lino. Studies from prisons show that if we lock tantrumming kids in the bathroom with that on the floor, they’ll calm down in no time. Or have a seizure. The results were inconclusive. 

Alexander Thorpe: the smuggest-looking man in carpeting