Every home has one. It was purchased with good intentions, probably because someone thought the bedroom needed “somewhere to sit”, despite the fact that nobody in the history of modern home ownership has ever entered their bedroom and thought, “You know what I’d really like to do now? Sit upright on a small chair in the corner.”
Nevertheless, the chair arrived. For perhaps the first three days, it genuinely functioned as furniture. Someone may even have sat on it once. Then a pair of jeans was placed over the back because they had only been worn for two hours and therefore weren’t sufficiently dirty to justify washing but somehow weren’t clean enough to be returned to the wardrobe. That single decision changed everything. Those jeans were the founding members of what would eventually become one of the largest privately owned textile collections in Britain. The chair ceased to be a chair and instead became something far more important: the official storage facility for clothes that exist in a legally undefined state between clean and dirty.
The system makes perfect sense when you don’t think about it. Properly clean clothes go in the wardrobe. Properly dirty clothes go in the washing basket. But what about the jumper you’ve worn for approximately 90 minutes while sitting downstairs? It isn’t dirty. Putting it in the wash would be wasteful. But putting it back alongside genuinely clean clothes somehow feels dishonest. You can’t return it to civilian life as though nothing happened. It has been outside the wardrobe. It has experienced things. So onto the chair it goes, where it joins yesterday’s jeans, a hoodie you might wear again tomorrow and a T-shirt that has somehow occupied this intermediate clothing dimension since Thursday. There is no written policy governing the chair, yet everyone instinctively understands its purpose. In fact, placing completely clean laundry on it would feel wrong. This isn’t where clean clothes belong. This is where clothes go to think about what they’ve done.
Over time, the chair develops layers. Archaeologists could probably determine your movements over the previous fortnight simply by excavating it carefully. Near the surface you’ll find yesterday’s jumper. Beneath that, Saturday’s jeans. Dig deeper and you’ll discover the shirt you wore to dinner nine days ago, followed by a cardigan you vaguely remember owning and possibly a pair of shorts from an entirely different season. Nobody deliberately creates this structure. It develops naturally, one item at a time, until eventually the chair itself disappears. You can’t see the seat. You can’t see the back. Occasionally one wooden leg remains visible beneath the fabric, providing the only evidence that there is still a piece of furniture somewhere inside. If someone unfamiliar with the house saw it, they’d probably assume you’d simply dumped an enormous pile of clothes in the corner. This would be completely inaccurate. There is a system. You couldn’t explain the system, and any attempt to document it would immediately expose serious weaknesses in its governance, but nevertheless there is definitely a system.
Periodically, usually during some ambitious weekend cleaning session, you decide enough is enough. Today, the chair will be reclaimed. You approach it with determination and begin sorting. Easy decisions first. Socks go in the washing basket. That’s straightforward. A clearly dirty T-shirt follows. Excellent. Progress. Then you reach the problematic items. The jeans. You pick them up and inspect them as though you’re a forensic scientist attempting to establish their recent history. When did you wear these? Tuesday? Possibly Wednesday. Were you out in them? You think you went to Tesco. Does Tesco count as sufficiently intensive activity to qualify trousers for washing? Probably not. You consider putting them in the wardrobe, but something prevents you. They’re not wardrobe clean. Yet washing them feels excessive. After approximately fifteen seconds of deliberation, you reach the only sensible conclusion and put them back on the chair. The hoodie receives the same judgement. So does the jumper. Within five minutes, you’ve successfully reduced the pile by approximately three socks and a T-shirt. You congratulate yourself on having “sorted the chair”.
The real danger arrives when somebody needs to actually use the chair. Perhaps you have guests staying over and someone makes the completely unreasonable suggestion that they’d like somewhere to sit. Suddenly you’re confronted with a logistical crisis. The chair cannot simply be cleared because every item currently stored there occupies a carefully established position within the household clothing ecosystem. Moving everything into the washing basket would create unnecessary laundry. Moving everything into the wardrobe would contaminate the clean population. So you deploy the emergency solution used by households across Britain: you move the entire pile onto the bed. The chair is restored instantly. Look at that. A chair. You’d almost forgotten what colour it was. For a few glorious hours it fulfils the purpose for which it was designed. Someone might even sit on it, an event so unusual it probably invalidates the warranty.
But eventually bedtime arrives, and now the enormous pile of semi-clean clothes is occupying the exact place where you’re supposed to sleep. You stand beside the bed considering your options. Sorting it properly would be sensible, but it’s nearly midnight and nobody has the emotional resilience to conduct a full clothing audit at that hour. So the entire collection is picked up, carried approximately four feet across the room and returned to the chair. Not folded. Not organised. Transferred. If anything, the situation is now worse because the previously established geological layers have been disturbed. Trousers have become intertwined with jumpers. One sleeve is hanging towards the floor. A belt has somehow attached itself to a dressing gown. The chair groans beneath the weight of another failed attempt at domestic organisation, and normal service resumes.
Occasionally the pile reaches a stage where basic physics becomes involved. Removing one item requires extensive risk assessment because everything above it has become structurally dependent upon something underneath it. You spot the black jumper you want somewhere near the middle, but extracting it could cause a catastrophic textile landslide. So you begin gently pulling one sleeve, millimetre by millimetre, like somebody removing a piece from the world’s least exciting game of Jenga. A pair of jeans shifts. The dressing gown moves. Something falls onto the floor. You freeze. Eventually the jumper comes free and half the chair collapses with it. This should be the moment when you finally admit defeat and sort everything properly, but instead you carefully rebuild the pile around the newly created gap. Civil engineering firms have shown less commitment to structural integrity.
Everyone has their own version of the chair. Sometimes it isn’t even a chair. It might be an exercise bike that hasn’t witnessed exercise since its assembly instructions were thrown away. It could be a small bench at the end of the bed, purchased after seeing one in a beautifully styled hotel room and subsequently discovering its true purpose is holding twelve jumpers and a Next bag containing something you’re supposed to return. Some people have upgraded to an entire armchair, presumably because their intermediate clothing inventory has expanded beyond the storage capacity of conventional bedroom furniture. But the principle remains identical. There must always be somewhere for The Clothes That Aren’t Quite Dirty Yet. Modern furniture retailers could save everybody a great deal of pretence by simply selling an enormous padded structure called “The Pile” and admitting that this is what we’re going to use it for anyway.
The chair therefore remains, year after year, quietly performing a job nobody originally intended it to do. You may occasionally glimpse photographs in magazines of beautifully minimalist bedrooms containing an immaculate chair with a single tasteful cushion sitting beneath a window. You look at these images and wonder where these people put their Thursday jeans. Where’s the hoodie they wore for twenty minutes while taking the bins out? Where is the jumper that’s too clean for the washing machine but has lost its security clearance for the wardrobe? Are we honestly expected to believe these people wash everything immediately? Or, just outside the carefully framed photograph, is there an enormous mountain of clothes balanced precariously on a treadmill?
One day, you tell yourself, you’ll develop a better system. You’ll become one of those organised people who folds clothes immediately, maintains an empty laundry basket and somehow knows whether a jumper is clean without conducting a smell test. The chair will finally be liberated. It’ll become a real chair again. Perhaps you’ll put a cushion on it. Maybe you’ll occasionally sit there with a book and enjoy a quiet cup of tea, exactly as you imagined when you bought it.
But not tonight.
Tonight you’re taking off your jeans.
They’re definitely not dirty enough for washing.
You look towards the wardrobe.
No.
Onto the chair they go.
And somewhere beneath six jumpers, two pairs of trousers and a dressing gown, the chair quietly accepts that 2017 isn’t coming back.
