A view from the top of a grassy hill. The view is dominated by Salt's Mill, a large sandstone building with a tall chimney. To the left are some other Saltaire buildings. In front is housing, both old stone terraces and mid-20th-century blocks of flats. The grass is empty, except for a solitary bench where it flattens out a little. In the background a wooded hill towers over the scene. The morning sky is partly cloudy.

A tale of two settees

This post starts with a couple of apologies. Firstly, that I completely forgot last week to post the answers to the quiz from two weeks ago. Posted today, sorry!

Secondly, this was supposed to be a timely post with a fun little story I started writing at a writing group on Tuesday, and finished on the train the following day. “Timely”, because the group was held at Lost in Leith, a pub which closes today as I post this to the blog, and which will be much missed. I thought it might be a nice way to mark its passing.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work out, because I didn’t finish it on Wednesday’s train. I had hoped to have some time over the following few days, but alas not. Today’s post should give you a bit of an idea of why that was.

I am in Yorkshire at the moment, because my mum is moving house. Specifically, she’s moving into a flat, and out of the house I grew up in—the only place I lived, broadly speaking, for the first 18 years of my life. I’m writing this yesterday,1 in a café in the place I still think of as my hometown, but that I will have diminishingly few links to once the house is sold.

You can imagine that this has been somewhat emotional for me, as someone who has rather too strong an attachment to physical mementos.2 On Thursday I looked around my mum’s living room; it saddened me that, while the room would still be there 24 hours later, what wouldn’t was everything that made it, well, my mum’s living room. Much of the furniture has been replaced or moved over the time I’ve known it, but somehow that continuity meant that every piece picked up the significance of thirty years of memories.

I consoled myself with the fact that this wasn’t being left behind or discarded. A removal firm were coming the next day to take the furniture a town over to Mum’s new place, so a lot of the things that made it feel familiar would still be around. Specifically, this thought fixated on the sofas. I’m not sure why, specifically—perhaps because they have been there since before I was born, brief sojourns to be recovered notwithstanding. But then, because they’ve been re-covered—their latest incarnation being a smart green corduroy—they aren’t the same as they always were. So maybe it was about the comfort a settee can provide. I don’t know.

I certainly have a lot of memories that involve them, as you might imagine for something that I sat on nearly every day before I went to uni. But some of them are oddly specific: as an example, I remember half-watching University Challenge with my mum, followed on BBC Two by An Island Parish, while playing Super Mario 64 DS and repeatedly falling off the edge of Rainbow Ride.3 There was that time, of course, when I sat on it so heavily that one of the springs pierced through the fabric at the bottom, meaning that (until it was repaired) there was a booby trap waiting to scratch your hand if you reached under for a lost cat toy. And, speaking of cats, I can’t skip over Luke (c. 1998–2018) and his habit, when bored, of draping himself over the arm, one front leg on each side, and (ironically) a hangdog look on his face.

A black-and-white cat sitting on the arm of a green sofa, facing forward. His front legs are splayed on either side of the arm, and he is looking down at the floor.
I don’t have a picture of Luke on the arm of the sofa in question, but I do have a picture of Luke doing the same thing on the arm of a different sofa (specifically, my aunt’s, when we were staying for Christmas).

The thing is, while the sofas loom large in my memories, they also loom large in real life: when the movers started taking them out, it quickly became apparent how hefty they were. On the morning of the move, I arrived back from taking some cardboard to the tip to find the two men trying to force one of them through the vestibule and out the front door.

The ground floor of a house, which has a stone fascia below the window and is white render above. There is a large window, and a door beneath a porch. A sofa is being pulled through the door; a bald, white man in a black t-shirt is looking away from the camera as he tries to manoeuvre it out. A small amount of foliage appears at the bottom of the picture.
I had no idea when I took this picture that I’d be writing a blog post about the sofas the next day…

They managed, after unscrewing the front legs, and giving Ross “PIVOT!” Geller a run for his money. The second one followed shortly after, and both were loaded into the van.

The inside of a removal van, lit mainly by its blue translucent panelled ceiling. In the middle of the van is a green corduroy sofa, on its back, perched atop another that is the right way up. Around then are other pieces of furniture, include a bed and mattress on the left, and a blanket chest on the right. There is a two-wheeled hand trolley, painted red, in the foreground.
I was trying to visually parse this image to write the image description. What tripped me up was that there are two sofas here, not just one.

At the other end of the short journey, they started with the smaller one. I didn’t see how they got it up the stairs, and then to the door of the flat. I did, though, see—and feel very awkward about—the attempt to negotiate the zig-zag through the flat door and into the hall. It took a very long time, not made easier by the fact that the back legs seemed not to want to come off like the front ones did. But, professionals that the movers were, they managed it. One more door to go, into the living room.

“That one’s bigger, isn’t it?” said my Mum.

“No,” said the older of the two movers, aghast. “It’s smaller.”

The new flat is in a converted older building, with interior walls that are a mix of original and new. The wall in question was one of the original ones, built of thick stone, and the door opening was original too. It was just that little bit narrower than a standard door is now, and it quickly became apparent that the sofa wouldn’t go through without taking the back legs off as well.

Unfortunately, they wouldn’t budge. The younger mover tried a hammer, but that didn’t loosen it enough to twist it off. In the end, with my mum’s permission, they whacked it hard enough just to break one of the legs off. It then became obvious what the problem had been: while most of the leg was a separate piece of wood, one corner extended up into the frame of the sofa. It was made of some sort of resin, filled with air bubbles that were revealed on the part where it had snapped off.

It would have been fixable, once through the door, but the other one was very resistant, and there was no guarantee it would go through even then. And this was the two-seater sofa: the thought of trying to get the three-seater in horrified all of us, even those who wouldn’t have to try and carry out the act itself. We were all agreed: the sofas would have to go.

The movers took the now-broken sofa back outside, onto the path leading to the door of the apartment block, awaiting collection on Monday for disposal.4 The men never attempted to bring the larger one in, instead lying it face-down on top of its partner. At my mum’s request, they sliced open the bottom of this larger one to retrieve a mystery item lost into the innards of the thing long ago,5 meaning that the black fabric of the base flapped in the wind. They were a sorry sight.

Like I said, I don’t know why I found this so emotional. I’m not ashamed to say that this was the point the emotion of the day hit me, and I cried a little.6 I calmed down, but every time I walked past them a little pang of sadness hit me. A better writer might convert this into a symbolic point about change, and what the sofas represented. But, honestly, I think it just made me sad to see something I’d thought was going to be a reminder of my old home now suddenly be destined for the scrapheap. What a waste, I thought.

My mum had promised the building group chat that she would cover the sofas with plastic sheeting so that they didn’t become too unpleasantly soggy over the few days’ wait for the movers. We drove back to Shipley, hoping to find something suitable in B&M (or, failing that, in the Wickes next door). But as we approached the store, Mum’s phone rang.

It was one of her new neighbours.

Some children, it seemed, had stolen one of the sofas.

We drove straight back the way we’d come, to find the smaller, more-broken sofa out of place. The other was nowhere to be seen. The cushions from both, however they’d been left, had now been stacked up neatly inside the lobby of the block. Apparently, the kids had vanished too quickly for anyone to catch them or take a picture—which, honestly, is impressive, because those things are heavy. It took three grown adults to move the remaining one back into place so it wasn’t blocking the path into the building.

While discussions about what to do with that one were ongoing, I decided to follow a hunch. I suspected, you see, that (quick as they may be) three children carrying a sofa would be just a little conspicuous. I didn’t expect to find them; I wasn’t sure I wanted to, because teenagers scared me even when I was one. But I did think I might find someone who’d seen them who could tell me something for us to pass on to the police.7

I don’t know what force moved me, halfway along the street, to switch to the one on the other side of the blocks of flats. But as soon as I did I saw three lads, hanging around at the end of the car park. They started hurrying off as soon as they saw me. Which was weird, because they weren’t really doing anything wrong. So I immediately suspect that, in fact, they were.

It didn’t take the investigative prowess of Miss Marple to identify the next clue, a pair of discarded sofa legs. And I was therefore fairly unsurprised, in a derelict bin store opposite where the children had been sitting, to find the sofa. It was placed neatly along the wall, opposite a low pile of discarded papers that looked like they might be being prepared for a bonfire.

A green corduroy sofa, with two spare sofa legs resting on the seat bottom. The cushions are missing. It sits on a concrete floor in a small room with breezeblock walls. To the left, partly cut off, are two metal chairs with black seats.
It was a far, far worse rest that it went to, than it had ever known.

I don’t know what the kids wanted with it. I think maybe they were making a den there, given the three chairs that were lined up perpendicular to it? But then why did they leave the sofa cushions behind? Honestly, I wonder if they were just bored, and wanted to see what happened.

The sofa is too heavy, and was moved too far, for us to take it back.8 So, for now, the plan is to get whoever comes on Monday to take the first one, and then ask them to drive along the street to collect the second. For the next few days, they will sit separately, until brought together again, as they’ve always been to whatever their final resting place will be. Without its mate balanced on top of it, the one straight outside the door looks almost inviting, like it’s a comfier alternative to the bench opposite. Not that anyone would want to sit on it: the cushions have gone to the tip now in the back of a rental car, and I doubt the corduroy liked Friday night’s rain.

Although—when I say “anyone”, I should emphasise that I’m only referring to humans. See, later that evening, another neighbour sent four photos of the unstolen sofa to the building group chat. In each of the four, a ginger cat called Monty was making himself very much at home.

Luke would have been proud.

A green corduroy sofa, missing cushions and legs, sits on a tarmac floor in front of a stone balustrade. A ginger cat is towards the left of the sofa, his back legs on the base and his front paws raised up onto the arm. The lighting is that of nightfall.
Image courtesy of mum’s neighbour Jo and, of course, Monty.

Update 05/10/2026: Yesterday evening, as we drove past, we noticed someone had closed the door to the bin store. As I left this morning I notice it was open again, so I thought I’d have one last look at the sofa. Both it and the chairs had gone. The one that wasn’t stolen is still waiting to be collected today.

  1. As of posting, obviously. I’m not (yet) a time-traveller. ↩︎
  2. For proof, see that time I posted an inconsequential bit of school work on the blog. ↩︎
  3. This post is not sponsored by the BBC, Nintendo, or the Isles of Scilly Tourist Board. ↩︎
  4. To answer a question you might have: the removal firm couldn’t take them away themselves because they didn’t have a licence to dispose of waste. ↩︎
  5. It was a round pound coin, withdrawn in 2017, so that was useful. ↩︎
  6. Okay, I guess I’m a bit ashamed, or I wouldn’t feel the need to say that… ↩︎
  7. To be clear, I don’t want random kids to get in a heap of trouble for stealing something that was destined for the tip anyway. But we did have to tell the police, if for no other reason than that fly-tipping is also illegal, so if we didn’t report it my mum could have been suspected of dumping it somewhere herself. ↩︎
  8. Seriously, I have no idea how the kids got it there. ↩︎

Privacy and cookies

By leaving a comment you acknowledge that you have read and agreed to the privacy policy. If you tick the box marked “Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment”, a cookie will be saved in your browser so that this information can be saved; by ticking the box you consent to this necessary cookie.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.