When owning a home was out of the question, my sofa was a bizarre marker of stability. But looks can be deceiving
Recently, I paid my local council £10 to get rid of a sofa. It was a two-seater in blush pink with curved arms, and the unsettling ability to never change shape after I’d sat on it. But it also repelled most spillages, so it became our “takeaway sofa”. A year in, two of its legs broke. After that, we propped it up with a pair of yoga blocks before finally, last week, calling it a day.
The sofa, which took almost four months to arrive and cost several hundred pounds – a sign, we presumed, of its enduring quality – came from Made.com, the furniture company that moved closer to administration this week with its share price tumbling by nearly 90% as it still searches for a buyer. I was not the first person of my generation to buy it, just as I was not the first to wait half a pregnancy for it to arrive, only to watch it then fall apart.