Comfort too late?

I do like my basic comforts, and one of those involves sitting on something more giving than hard metal springs.

     I do admit that I am not good at looking after certain things, and those include garden/beach chairs.  My reasoning is that they are designed to be used in the garden and on the beach and therefore they should survive both those environments without my having to give them any special treatment.  

     So, they are used from about May-sih to October-ish and then I ignore them.  Amazingly I did make the supreme effort to put my chair under the ‘eves’ of my study windows giving out onto the terrace on the third floor, to allow a certain degree of protection from the elements, but from then onwards the chair had to fend for itself though the winter and early spring months until the weather was clement enough to consider sitting out in the sand-filled sea breezes of the start of the tourist season.

     While the metal construction of the chair survived well, the cushioned cover did not fare at all well and it assumed the appearance of fragile, agèd parchment and had the same proclivities to rend and tear.  Which it did.

     Now, I have a fairly high I-couldn’t-give-a-shit approach to meaningless appearances and, in spite of the fact that I can feel and hear my mother’s refrain of “I was ashamed when you . . .” when taking a tatty chair to the beach, I can generally ignore pitying eyes and anyway I cover things up with a very large beach towel.

     It is when the ‘parchment’ material starts powdering and leaving a residue on newly browned flesh that one feels that a certain limit has been reached.  And, when every time the cushioned seating is adjusted, and a part of it comes off in one’s hand, one feels that the time for a replacement it nigh.

     It is, however, towards the end of the season, and beach accoutrements have been put away and shelves cleared for the over-kill of merchandise for Halloween, so that asking for a replacement cushion is looked on as a slightly odd request at this time of the year.

     We intend to go to the beach this morning and I decided yesterday that I would take off the old broken cushion to force myself to do a pilgrimage around the Stations of the Chinese Superstores to find a replacement.

     We are constantly urged to support local shops, and we do try and do that.  But our experiences of trying to be supportive have been, to put it mildly, mixed. 

      I seem to remember shopping when I was younger and if the shop that you were in was unable to supply something they would either say, “We can order that for you and have it in for next week,” or “Why don’t you try so and so’s, they might have it there.”  We rarely find this level of basic service, and I have to say that the level of service in the Chinese Superstores is variable as well (usually in direct inverse relationship to how well or how badly they speak Spanish) but the stuff you want is usually there.  It may take some finding, but somewhere, it lurks waiting for your eyes to light up in recognition.

     It took me three stores to find something that would work, and fit, but find it I did, and so I will blend-in in bland uniformity rather than stand out in indigent tatters.

     On a beach that, in our locality, is gratifyingly empty nowadays, my ‘new’ chair will have an audience of exactly one, my partner.  

     But, as my mother would undoubtedly add, “That doesn’t make a difference.  You’ve done the proper thing!”

     Dead parents are stern masters!