Table manners

Normally it's Francis who makes bizarre home decor decisions but this month, it's my turn. And I've taken full advantage of the fact.

The table was heavily reduced at the end of the sales and, judging by the torn and tattered nature of the price tag, had been for some time when I saw it - two enormous clues that could scarcely have been any more obvious if they'd come with big, red labels reading, "Don't buy this table," or "Unbeatable offer - exclusively reserved for the stupid and gullible!!!!"

Clearly my deerstalker hat and logical deduction gene is a more than normally recessed one.

"That's a very good price," I said to the assistant who gave me a look that I took, at the time, to be one of shared complicity but was, I now realise, a prime, "Is this one really this stupid or does she simply have a first rate sense of irony," expression.

"Mmmmm," she said, without committing herself.

"Large. Cheap. Slightly scuffed. Cheap. Solid..."

"And cheap," she chimed in, cleverly sensing the way my mind was working.

"I'll take it," I said.

She gave me another of those looks. This time I think it was tempered with pity.

"I hope the table's OK," said Francis, after he's dragged what looks like the hull of the Kontiki into the kitchen, "because it's so heavy I don't think we'll ever get it back out again."

He sets to work with a screwdriver and puts on the legs.

"Mmmmmmm," he says, as the fourth goes on, sounding like the assistant. "Right. Help me turn it over."

"A triumph," I say.

"Did you try sitting down before you bought it?" he asks. "No? Go on, then."

When I do, the fatal flaw strikes me. The table is ludicrously high. If you're less than six foot tall, sit down and your head bobs above the table top like a swimmer in choppy water. Deborah will struggle to see her plate in the evening, let alone manage to point her cutlery in the direction of the food.

"Bloody hell," says Lindy, as she sits down at the new kitchen table. "What sort of look are you aiming for? A tea time dwarves' symposium? Mind you," she adds. "It could be quite fun. I've always thought you come with some much more exciting names for Snow White's little friends........"