We’re trying to choose a carpet for the living room and it’s turning into the world’s biggest faff, partly because I have never known another human being as indecisive as Mr AMR, who can deliberate over some minute detail for well over a month, but also because it seems to me that approximately 98% of carpets look exactly the same.
I don’t know whether you’ve been into a carpet shop recently, but it’s honestly as though they are playing a Candid Camera prank on you. Half of the displays look indistinguishable from one another, with the same bleachable, washable, non-moth-eat-able synthetic pile in fifty shades of grey and twenty shades of light beige. You work your way through the piles of rectangular samples, slapping them down one after another and thinking that maybe you’ve gone colour-blind because each shade of “wheat” looks almost identical to the last one. “Can I help you guys"” says the chirpy man with his name badge on upside down.
“No.” (Don’t even get me started on the “guys” thing – that’s a whole other conversation.) “Unless you can suddenly magic away all of the pieces of carpet that are exactly the same colour, so that I can actually have a sensible selection to choose from, you cannot help me.”
“Oh, haha! Well, we couldn’t do that, because we’d only be left with two carpets. Guys. The red one with the cream pin-st...