My Walls

I've shown you round my flat before. I've not actually shown you my taste in wall hangings though. Some of you won't be surprised, others of you probably will.

Because in fact, I don't live in a Spartan home composed of Ikea furniture and a brave new world of modernism. I have quite eclectic tastes and the odd guilty secret.

The image above hangs above the fake fire in the living room, in case anyone is tempted to believe that the apparently bohemian and alternative lifestyle of the inhabitant negates the Catholicity of the household...



I collect what you might describe as replica antique maps. They're not genuine obviously, they're prints. I guess you could describe this as one of my guilty secrets. My boss once said 'I bet your home is full of incense and bean bags and banners on the walls'.
Well, banners there are, as you would have seen in the post where I showed you round, but incense is rarely a feature, and bean bags in fact, noticeable by their absence.

It is in fact a guilty pleasure of mine to trawl little old curiosity shops looking for interesting maps and the like to hang on the walls. Often they have personal significance- the Emerald Isle above, for example has a prominent position, but sometimes they're chosen because they're interesting.



This map of the world, for example. It was chosen mainly because of how wrong it is. In many respects it is partly cartographically correct. But a look at the western coast of America, the bizarre misconceptions of the zone between Asia and America, amongst other features make it interesting to look up at, as I lie on the couch pondering the subjectivity of human knowledge.



Worcestershire is not the county where I was born, but it is kind of the area I was raised. Or more specifically, the northern part, what is now the green fringes of Britain's second city. A good part of what is shown on this map has now been subsumed by Birmingham, and though where I live is still outside the city boundary, there isn't much greenery in between. When I lived in what is now the Inner city, it was possible for me to physically walk to the houses of friends who lived in what was still by today's standards inner Birmingham, and yet these places are actually villages on this map- King's Norton, Yardley etc. Notice as well that at that time the county, as did most counties, possessed a number of little exclaves, enclaves and detached portions. Both Dudley and Shipston on Stour lay in parts of the county detached from the main body and Worcestershire had about eight of these, I think.



This proclamation hangs on the living room door. Just in case anyone feels tempted to forget the kind of beliefs I tend to have. The document is, I believe one of the most inspiring documents ever written. If you haven't ever read the Proclamation of Independence of the Irish Republic, I recommend you do so. Of course, visitors to my flat often don't get the choice.



And some aren't chosen for much reason at all.

I don't really have much more space to hang things, without making the place look like a gallery and as it stands I find I periodically rotate the hangings because I have spare ones sitting behind the dining table (No, I have never yet eaten at the dining table. It really is just for show). I sometimes think about trying to get hold of some Bosch prints, because I often think they'd look quite impressive, but aside from that, my tastes are actually surprisingly conservative in some ways. At times I even worry they might be a little too...

I don't know. I always laugh at the kind of people who go to garden centres and buy stone lions to adorn either side of a foot wide path that leads all of the ten feet it takes to reach the garden shed that is otherwise the sole feature of their box-sized garden.

I find people who get excited by the possibility of putting daido rails along the ceiling clearly have too much time on their hands.

I do not, and probably never will, see why people are prepared to pay over a thousand pounds for a bed that looks like Charles II might have made love to Neil Gwynne in it, when getting it up the staircase of the average three bedroomed semi was not a problem Charles II ever faced.

I got my King sized double for a hundred quid. And it does me fine.

So yes, I'm tempted to smirk at the affectations of the average 'bourgeois' homeowner, I guess. But sometimes I wonder if some of my tastes might not themselves appear affected to others. There is, after all, something very typically 'bourgeois' about having replica antique maps on your walls.

But then I think, none of them actually cost me more than a tenner. I'm not sticking stuff on the walls because it's expensive, or people think it looks grand. Ultimately, I'm sticking things on the walls I like to look at.

I suppose in some ways, I can be a little elitist when it comes to art and taste in my own way. Perhaps we all are.

Still, I like what I like.