As we are now looking at having to furnish a large house in France we have started looking at some of the inappropriate pieces of furniture which we kept from our previous , and much larger house, (because we were fond of them), and shoehorned into our present, much smaller house.
Deciding that these would be much happier in the presbytery in France we decided to do a tour of the furniture shops in Dublin on Saturday afternoon to find appropriate pieces to swap.

In M&S we were looking at a sofa but found ourselves unable to see the price as a middle-aged man was squatting on it.
He turned out to be totally unfazed by my request to read the label under him.

The next furniture department we went into was Arnotts, a vast area of three piece suites and there we observed the phenomenon again.
Middle aged men squatting comfortably on sofas.
It came to a head in Clearys where we counted four middle aged squatters.
There was a marked similarity between these men.
The age was early sixties or perhaps a little older, they were dressed in raincoats or anoraks and were certainly respectable,clean and did not in anyway threaten anyone.
It slowly began to dawn on Sile and I what this was all about.
These were men brought into the city on a Saturday afternoon and then placed on a sofa by their wives while they went off and did the shopping.

I had this lovely notion of a harassed house wife rushing up to the furniture department in (let’s say) Clearys only to glance around at the vacant sofas in despair and say something like
“Shit! I must have left him in Arnotts”.