It seems as an industry we have more work to do to get all the British public on our side. The following text forms part of a blog post from a lady living in the Brighton area. The headline for this post is taken from the tag she uses on her post.
Enjoy:
Don’t get me started on the subject of conservatories. I loathe them. Not real ones obv. Real ones that were made by real people with the real purpose of growing plants are lovely. No. It is the pretend ones I cannot stand. The ones that estate agents try to sell me as a winsome feature of a house and which are supposed to denote class, style and taste. Bollocks to it. I shout, waving my fist with bits of spit flecking off my fledgling beard hair. They are expensive, invariably faulty, incredibly ugly (sticking out like UPVC buboes on a plaguey armpit), and always end up as a space where you:
stick the dog when visitors come round, which means that it smells of dog all year round, rendering it totally uninhabitable by everyone else but the dog.
stick the children’s toys because there is nowhere else to put them and you are sick of falling over them in the lounge. Now they are wedged in the conservatory, which is basically a giant, see through toy box and you pass it every day wondering what on earth possessed you to pay out shedloads of money for such a monumental waste of plastic tat (and the toys)
stick the garden furniture to stop it disintegrating in the rain until the summer. Then it rains all summer, so it becomes a giant, see through garden shed instead.
pretend that it is ‘your’ space, so you fill it with things like easels, and exercise bikes and ski equipment and yoga mats for when you finally get around to pampering yourself and having some ‘me’ time. Then you pass it every day as you run backwards and forwards smothering chicken nuggets in tomato sauce, and wiping arses, and singing the third verse to ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ in descant, and elucidating ten facts about the Egyptian afterlife, and it just taunts you as the cobwebs festoon the bars of the exercise bike and you guiltily wipe sauce off your face.
pretend that it is going to look like Andy McDowell’s conservatory in Green Card, by buying four hundred lobelias from B&Q in those small black plastic pots and putting them in there to overwinter before you bed them out in the spring, promising yourself a ‘riot of colour’. What happens is that they freeze all night and roast all day and after three days in the conservatory you appear to have re-enacted on bedding plants, the scorched earth policy of the US government when faced with the dilemma of the lush, Vietnamese jungle, only without having to resort to Agent Orange. You buy a rubber plant, just like the ones in the doctor’s surgery. Failsafe. It sits in a wicker plant holder, covered in dust and for some inexplicable reason smelling of cat wee. After several weeks you realise that you have failed to water it. It does not matter. It will not die. It sits there leering at you. You start to get paranoid about it. It is thinking about how horrible you have been to it. No amount of Baby Bio and leaf shine will rectify things. You know that it is secretly shuffling about the conservatory at nights, spawning and hatching plots. Eventually you know that it will rise up and kill you in your bed. Just like the triffids. You should destroy it. On the other hand, it is quiet now, probably best not to disturb it. You can no longer go into the conservatory. It is a war zone.
That is why I don’t like conservatories. And more proof that we English are rubbish at building things to live in.
When the Romans introduced underfloor heating, interior decor and baths with hot running water, what did we do? We waited until they went home and turned their villas into pig sties while we sat, freezing our bollocks off in a house that even the two most stupid of the three little pigs would have been mortally ashamed of, that were basically made of cow shit and straw. We are idiots.
I am thinking of moving to Scandinavia. I can have a lovely warm house and run about all day long wearing mink bikinis and throwing the children into pools of scalding water heated by volcanos, paying 2p per year for my fuel bills and spending the rest on Amazon orders and Ikea furniture. The downside would be learning to love rollmop herrings, but I could adapt.
I’m wondering whether she might be interested in one of our UPVC orangeries instead. I’ll happily go give her a quote, especially if she puts one of those mink bikinis on for me.
