My wife and me spent several days recently choosing curtain materials. And yes, before you write in, I know there's something wrong with that sentence: namely that no man in his right mind should ever get involved in choosing curtain materials.
But I was involved, deeply involved, because at the time I believed there was much more at stake than just the choice of curtains. What was at stake, I believed, was nothing less than the sexual identity of our livingroom. You see, as any interior designer will tell you, there are competing male and female visions of room design. The "male" ideal is (broadly speaking) one of clean lines, cool colours and uncluttered spaces; while the "female" ideal is (again broadly speaking) completely tasteless. Sorry, that last bit should have read "soft lines, warm colours and lots of visually interesting detail". Anyway, these competing visions had been at play in our home, where my wife and I were engaged in a bitter struggle for the soul of the livingroom. The result was a room which, while having an undeniable chemistry about it, was painfully unsure of its sexuality.
This made for a certain amount of tension in the house, needless to say. It started with a few harmless colour clashes, and the odd staring match between the (predominantly female) sofa and the (predominantly male) fireplace.
More recently it had threatened to turn ugly. My wife's dried-flower arrangement was refusing to speak to the coffee table, the fireplace was having blazing rows with the floor, and one day we came home to find the Japanese paper lamp wrestling with the hearth rug, pulling lumps out its hair and . . . (That's enough of the metaphor - Ed)
So the choice of curtains became crucial to whether this riot of conflicting emotions would be resolved one way or another, or whether we'd end up with a livingroom equivalent of Israel's winning Eurovision entry.
And this is why, although curtain choice has been a female prerogative since prehistoric woman first decided to brighten up the cave, I insisted on being involved in the process. But I discovered, as many other men must have done before me, that curtain selection is a bridge too far in the home-decoration war. A painful thing happened in those curtain showrooms, which was only partly attributable to having an 11 lb baby hanging out of me for hours on end. Faced with hundreds - thousands - of different materials, all my certainties deserted me. Stock choices which had served well everywhere else, such as "black", "white", and "28-inch flat-screen" were useless in these forests of multi-textured, multicoloured curtain roll. And this was even before we got into the haberdashery end of things.
After the first few showrooms, the word "fabric" was making me ill. My wife sensed her advantage, exploiting my confusion with questions such as: "Are you sure you're not colour-blind?" And long before she said the dreaded words "There's a place in Bray that's supposed to have an even bigger selection", I was already waving a white flag.
I couldn't have put it into exact words at the time, but what I think I experienced in those curtain showrooms was grief for the loss of contact with my own inner wildness. I know that now, from an article I just read in the New York Review of Books. The subject of the article was the revisionist-western novels of Cormac McCarthy, and in it the reviewer explained the popularity of the books with a male readership by saying they "offer to men living late in the history of civilisation a consoling picture of their own inner wildness, allowing them safe passage across the border into a familiar world of romance".
The great question posed by these books, the writer added, was "What are men?" The answer was that "men are strong, silent and impetuous, wedded to honour and horses, chaste and ardent, sensitive and loyal". Totally unsuited to choosing curtain materials, the article didn't add, but it could have done.
I have never sat on a horse, never mind been wedded to one, but I realise now that in those curtain showrooms I was straying too far from the country of my inner wild man. The experience has been a chastening one, and has cooled my ardour for interior design generally, which was the slippery slope that led me into curtains in the first place.
Of course, having a baby in the house does help to keep you in touch with your wild self. Whatever anyone else does, the baby never loses the picture of her inner wildness, and she never misses an opportunity to show you a picture of it too, often on the front of your freshly-cleaned shirt.
Babies also tend to become the major factor in most of your interior design choices. I don't think ours has a preference for any particular school of design, but she does seem to have a very low tolerance for clean lines. Every time she sees a clean line she pukes on it, while her mother silently cheers.
As a doting father and now retired room-designer, however, I'm not complaining. In fact, the next time my wife goes shopping for curtain materials, I'm going to be at home minding the baby, being strong and chaste and sensitive and loyal for her, and burping her over the dried-flower arrangement.