I have a penchant for plastic flowers. There, I’ve said it. As a newspaper columnist, I dislike causing controversy, but I’m risking it here as it’s a matter about which I feel strongly.
Now, obviously, you have thought of me hitherto as rugged and stern, a man of the great outdoors, a man with a beard. A reader has raised her hand. Yes, madam? “No, we have always thought of you as the sort of man who would like plastic flowers.”
I see. Well, that’s a bit of a blow to my self-esteem, frankly. Rugged? All right, I concede it: not really. Stern: hmm, whiney might be more accurate. But at least I have a beard, and you will never take that away from me, not stuck on it as it is with this super-strength Velcro.
All the same: plastic flowers. How ridiculous. A man in my position! How did this fancy come about? Well, let me explain firstly that I know nothing of interior decor. I haven’t even got round to painting any of the walls in this house since moving in.
I tend to just stick with what I’m given until I’m tellt firmly by the responsible authorities to do something. Chairs and other furnishings get put down temporarily somewhere when I move in and are still there months, or even years, later.
I just don’t think about it, have no visual arts sense whatsoever and, indeed, have been told often that I’m colour blind. The expression, “You’re not wearing that with that, are you?”, has come up frequently in my life.
So, once again, the nation cries: whence this love for plastic flowers, you nitwit? Well, while nitwit is fair enough, “love” is over-egging it a bit.
It’s just that, when I’m in the home furnishings section of a department store or supermarket, I sometimes think I should buy something for the house. Usually, I can’t afford anything substantial, but you can always pick up plastic flowers for under a fiver.
The main consideration, though, is that they look so lovely. I have them now in every room.
What better to decorate your house than artefacts that mimic nature? Nature is odd. It abhors a straight line and loves symmetry only where flawed (a cornerstone of traditional Japanese art: the flaw makes the beauty).
But nature creates wonderful, somehow satisfying shapes that appeal to the human psyche, and if you’re going to have shapes aboot your hoose they might as well be, you know, flowery.
The fact that plastic flowers may be seen by others as naff only enhances their attraction. You say: “What about getting in real flowers, ken?”
That is a good point well made. Shortly before the lockdoon, visiting friends brought me tulips. But these blooms are deid noo. And the plastic flowers live on.
I do have a couple of pot plants that have been with me for many years, and several houses, now. But they demand a lot of watering, at least once a week, and I’m far too busy for that sort of thing.
No, give me the never-changing, unnatural representations of the natural world. They brighten up rooms, make few demands on their owner, offend all the right people, and are in their own, mass produced way, little works of art.
