House Rules: The unnecessary things you really want

Rainy Sundays can expose you to a lot of advertisements, which can lead to a great deal of angst. The best ads create desire by making you feel you lack something essential. Practical, physical or emotional; the product or service then comes galloping in, as if on a white horse, to save the day.

But my sofa is nice and comfortable, and with the rain tipping at the windows, the blandishments of furniture shop DFS weren’t taking. Neither, from a contented weekend’s perspective, were fast loans at 1,243 per cent APR, or the wholesome (yet subtly racy) family cars such a loan might support.

Instead, as I clicked through the channels, I thought about what a life-changing device the remote control has been. It’s up there with the kettle and dimmer switches.

Life is full of inventions that we don’t need, in the existential sense of the word, that are nonetheless life changing.

In the presidential suite at the Castlemartyr Resort in Cork (castlemartyrresort.ie: it was for research purposes, I swear), I discovered a bedside button that opened the curtains, and the delights of knowing the weather before discarding the duvet.

Staying in bed, a weekend with a friend revealed the Kaydian TV bed (beds.ie) with a screen that pops up at the touch of another button; as well as the joys of recliner sofas. Then there’s underfloor heating in the bathroom, a single switch that can turn off all the lights in the house at once, smartphone systems to put the heating on while you’re out and about and Energlaze (energlaze.ie) glass that lets you keep your own lovely windowframes while adding insulation.

Getting into it, the list expands to fat-free Airfryers (harveynorman.ie) for almost healthy chips, the Chromecast (currys.ie) to stream to your TV, and that’s before getting into older “new” things such as SatNavs. It’s a comforting thought, on a rainy Sunday, that out there, there are teams of people dedicated to solving problems we didn’t know we had. “What’s the single thing you don’t have that could change your life?” I asked my friend. “A butler,” he replied.