Make a statement of your home. Say what? I/we live here, I/we have this much cash/taste/discernment/flair/time. Not being Shakers, not schooled in the arts of pure, simple making or any making, having instead to buy, beg or borrow beds, chairs, tables and attempt to signify self or a communal identity with the assembled results. Nonetheless we make an attempt. The shock of the old. The schlock of the new. Easier to pick a past, fixed period and lovingly, humorously recreate it (having only so much cash/time etc.) than to pick from the new-made (as distinct from the new-mass-produced). How to know if the very new will keep faith with you in the future. The simplest is regularly the most lovable, in its encapsulating (of course) a memory of origins: the line of an aesthetic bentwood chair not only saying 'tree'but fluidity, water, arch of sky. Raw material artfully tooled in a new rendition of 'natural'. I stare through this window into a thicket of uprights: a stand of bamboo. Include the horizontal on a regular basis and you have a grid. Uprights and cross-beams, together or severally, we see from the beginning. Woven wicker at eye-level in the crib, uprights around the cot and playpen; woven wire fences round my first house (beyond the thicket of hedge). Mesh stockings I remember from later. Tennis nets, racquets. Geometry is a lure and a snare, promising solid essences while beneath the planes and lines is a whirling mass of protons and neutrons at play. Although I can bruise myself on this illusory table and be quite incontrovertibly run over by an only-apparently-solid grey and rectilinear bus. Lattices are back, newly fashionable after being in decline since Nanna used them to train grapes up the side of the shed. Airy, a little exotic (beckoning and repelling) and also severe in their upholding of the principles of load-bearing structures. A grid picks apart close weave so you can see daylight through the chinks. Geometry you can see past, an open finding. All the same a barrier. Here is the purpose of a see-through wall: a boy in school uniform smokes, clearly visible while technically sequestered, behind a fence of feet-apart perpendicular rods, two houses down from the school boundary. A room full only of furniture is a museum. Is it only in English you get that double-entendre such that 'room' is space as well as chamber? What to put in it, if you have the choice (cash etc.)? How to fill the expectant vacuum? With the most simple, the most 'natural' (within your means)? But moderns mistrust the ascetic although we will certainly die and perhaps should be in training: a whisper that early days with nuns implanted in so many...). A room is an amniotic space, but filled with hard things you bump into. The person in the armchair aspires to the abandonedness of womb-living, which we would all at bottom choose over room-living. Safety, suspendedness, floating, being an insider. Instead of afloat, we're aground - on pebbles and grit and clods and roots. Defying gravity, though, in rooms. Sustained by chairs, aided and abetted by tables, borne aloft in beds. Thus supported, daring to include amongst our familial objects some items with unsettling outside resonances: a table recast as a tree; a lamp so tall and remote as to say 'star'. But trying to avoid sententiousness, for these are things the kids will knock over and spill cordial and spaghetti sauce on (aren't they?), not sacraments or altars. Remembering Ron Padgett's 'Love Poem' in Triangles in the Afternoon where he both captures the instinct to adore the elemental icon and punctures it. (He is talking about Ohio Blue Tip matches): Here is the most beautiful match in the world, its one and a half inch soft pine stem capped by a grainy dark purple head, so sober and furious lighting, perhaps, the cigarette of the woman you love, for the first time, and it was never really the same after that... We must also infuse into our domestic collections some irony, after all we've been through. In this millennial moment, what? I could worship an old Slazenger tennis racquet with catgut strings and the names of John Newcombe and Margaret Court on the handle, because it takes me back to some moments of twelve-year-old certainty. The wood and the catgut seem precious and real. In my hallway, a table a bit like a school desk, but artfully so. V-shaped iron struts at each corner, a polished three-paneled surface with nail-holes around the edge of each panel, finished with a surround of chipped but polished dowelling, the panels supported on a solid wooden base with traces of verdigris finish, all lacquered. It might have been made on a farm; it might have been cleverly composed in a studio last month or last year. I'd rather not know.