Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

No, I’m not really a coffee snob; honestly, I’m not. I like good coffee, yes, but I don’t bore people with endless talk of beans, roasting, grinding, etc. How could I? I’m no expert, so I’d sound like a complete idiot. Besides, when all is said and done, it’s still only a hot drink, right? I just appreciate drinking the stuff when the quality is good. There’s really nothing quite like the pleasure of a great cup of coffee.

In search of the ever better cuppa, I biked over to Brandmeester’s this afternoon to pick up the two Grand Cru coffees I ordered at the beginning of the month.

I picked up 125 g of each of Jamaican Blue Mountain and Puerto Rico Alto Grande. I’m really looking forward to trying each of these and discovering if they’re as good as they’re cracked up to be. Production of these coffees is limited, so they’re only available a few times per year by advance order. Sounds snobby, doesn’t it? I wonder if I’ll even be able to tell them apart from all of the other varieties I’ve recently drunk. We’ll soon see.

We’ve been making some good progress of late on furnishing the house.

Some time ago, we decided that it would be nice to place a Persian carpet in the sitting room. We then held off on purchasing furniture for that room, because we needed to see what kind of carpet we would eventually buy. After all, such a carpet would set the whole tone of the room and the rest of the furniture would have to be chosen with that in mind.

Unfortunately, because we had a strong suspicion that it would take us forever to decide on a carpet, we found it all too easy to constantly postpone going out and even looking for one. We also needed a rather large carpet, 4 m × 3& m, which we knew would mean we wouldn’t have much choice in the small shops in and around Amsterdam.

Then came a recommendation from one of our favourite furniture shops to try I.C.E. Oosterse Tapijten in Waardenburg, so we drove the 70 km or so along the A2 yesterday to see what they had to offer. We were not disappointed.

A couple of hours later, we’d picked out five quite striking carpets as candidates for our living room. We made an appointment with I.C.E. to bring them to us Friday morning so that we could look at each one in its prospective surroundings.

An hour or so later, we’d picked one of the five to spend the next several decades gracing the floor of our living room. I.C.E. fitted an anti-slip undermat to keep the carpet in place and then left, taking the four runners-up with them. A genuinely frightening invoice will be winging its way to me within the next few days. On the other hand, every time I think of how much it cost, I just glance over at it and am immediately forced to admit to myself once again that it truly is a stunning work of art.

I have an armchair in mind for that room now, so Sarah and I went out Friday afternoon to see if we could find a couch that would look good with the carpet and that chair. We think we’ve found one, but we need to shop around a bit more before committing to purchasing it. To complete the room, we’re thinking of purchasing a couch, two armchairs and a glass coffee table. We’ll probably add a sideboard of some kind, too. We’ve already seen a couple of nice coffee tables, but we’re looking for one with a wooden frame, as Eloïse is sure to bash her head against it at some point.

So what else have we done on the house lately?

Well, we finally ordered some dining-room chairs to go with the table we purchased a few months ago. I’ve lost track of how many shops we had to visit before finally settling on a model at a local shop. Again, they’re an expensive set of chairs, from the Maxalto collection, but the quality is superb. Not only do they look great, but — most importantly, of course — they are extremely comfortable. It’s essential to me to be able to spend hours at a time at the dining room table, because, for me, that’s the focal point of the main living area during the day. I like to relax there, read the paper and drink coffee. Many dining-room chairs are comfortable enough to enjoy a meal, but don’t stand the test of prolonged sitting. Anyway, we ordered them in brown oak with reddish brown leather upholstery.

In the name of security, we’ve also had all of the glass panels at the back of the house replaced with break-in-resistant glass. This will hopefully deter future break-in attempts. If not, it will certainly retard their progress. We’re also planning to add some motion-detector activated lights that will be turned on if someone trespasses in the garden. Speaking of the garden, we need to turn our attention to that now, too. It looks rather spartan and dull at the moment.

Our foyer now has a beuatiful old lamp to illuminate it. It really adds character to the entrance. Unfortunately, we were unable to hang up the lights we had purchased for the downstairs hallway and the bedroom, because the light fittings in those places were unable to hold the weight. One of those lights is now in a box in the cellar, whilst the other has been returned to the antique shop for a refund. It would be a lot of work to alter the fittings so that there is a cross-beam above them to support the weight and now is not really the time for us.

Owning a home and furnishing it with carefully chosen items of high quality is actually hard work, we’ve discovered. Obviously, however, the reward is proportional to the amount of work you put in.