KEY POINTS:
Let's face it: no one gives my people, the design-jinxed, decor-challenged, any attention. You don't tend to get many impassioned critiques on the exact nature of someone's dire tastelessness and lack of ideas ("Love the perfect juxtaposition of the mildew and the Homebase lampshade").
The design-jinxed have always
been a neglected tribe - a bit like those babies who used to stagger around in the olden days with sodden nappies around their ankles while their feckless mums smoked.
We are a hidden community, forced underground by our inability to "visualise" and "transform". The really sad thing is we like being neglected. We prefer being hidden. If you had homes like ours you would hide too.
It's a sad fact of life that while most people have an inner interior designer (or think they do), they also possess an inner jinx. Yet the decor-challenged are not this way on purpose.
At heart, I'm just like every other female - I want everything in the world that is covetable and expensive, and I want it right now. Trouble is, I haven't the money or the vision to achieve my dreams. For instance, the Imagine video's iconic white room was my first decor daydream. Wasn't it great? Perhaps change a couple of details (keep the grand piano, lose the hippies), and wow man, as they used to say, we'd be tripping. Which is exactly what the design-jinxed like myself would do - walk in with a big cup of coffee, trip over the carpet, and before you know it, it'd all be over for the joss sticks and cream beanbags.
This is because being design-jinxed is inbuilt. In one of my first abodes, I was famous for attempting to stuff a sofa into a duvet cover - I genuinely thought it would work.
Another time, before I became a gorgeous and sensitive vegetarian, we decorated our house with cow skulls. Yes, you read right. Cow skulls. We'd found them in a nearby field, they had bullet holes in the forehead - and oblivious to the fact that few people visited us more than once, and when they did they screamed, we thought they looked great.
Nor did things get much better. I once went design-mad and painted an entire house one of those whitish shades that pretend not to be magnolia ("hint of rip-off" I think it was called) and it ended up looking quite eerie and stark. People would walk in and think they had been transported to outer space. ("We come in peace.") See what I mean? You just can't fake this level of decor ineptitude - you've either got it or you haven't.
It's a wonder in these chic and bijou times that someone hasn't come up with a system to deal with embarrassments like me. A kind of social services for decor, where people can have their homes taken away from them for crimes against taste. It wouldn't matter how much you protested ("The woodchip was already here!"), once you were caught with an "amusing" loo seat with swimming-goldfish detail, that would be it. You would be forced to roam the streets with a stolen supermarket trolley full of paint charts for the rest of your life, peering into other people's windows, dreaming of what might have been.
Maybe that's the answer. The main problem with being design-jinxed is that while one has no natural taste, one can't really afford to buy it off anybody else - as in hire an interior designer - either. So maybe we should just steal this "good taste" thing. We could become decor Peeping Toms. If you admire someone's hair or jacket, you could follow them home. Then you could keep popping up from behind walls and hedges to have a little peek at what they've done to their front rooms, go home and copy it. Next time "Peeping Tom" the kitchen and so on, until your entire house is furnished in someone else's good taste. It could be done nicely; it could be flattering for the victims.
Until, that is, you're arrested. As with anything, there was always going to be a downside to this design lark.
- Observer
