I HAVE A DREAM

My new found home is reminiscent of the flats that that people who have spent a lot of time in institutional care find themselves in after release. The walls are a uniform magnolia and the carpet, which is fitted everywhere save the kitchen and bathroom, is a suspicious blue that could be hiding any number of grubby secrets. The curtains, which hang limply at the windows, are the colour of old ladies’ support hose and in the bedroom the central lightshade appears to have been fashioned from human skin. It is a dirty yellow colour and at night, when the light is on, it bathes the room in a deathly hue. Perhaps the landlord picked it up from a garage sale at Hannibal Lecter’s place.

 To date I have not done a great deal to make my surroundings more comfortable. I have an inflatable mattress for a bed and a blue, nylon camping chair in the front room. This tends to be where I do most of my deep thinking. Given the Spartan surroundings I am unlikely to be coming up with a new General Theory of Relativity any time soon.

It is unsurprising that I try my hardest not to be at home. Nevertheless, and much to my irritation, the place still gets dirty; especially the bathroom. I strongly suspect that when I lock the door on my way out a hairy tramp climbs in through the window and spends the time I am away sleeping naked in the bath, rousing himself only to scratch furiously. When I return home the bathroom is ankle deep in hair. Things have got so bad that I have given serious thought to buying a vacuum cleaner. Speaking as a man who doesn’t have a TV I am worried that my priorities may be seriously out of whack.

All of this is a long winded explanation of why it is I find myself on a Sunday afternoon in Homebase looking at bathroom accessories.

I am weighing up the competing aesthetic claims of various toothbrush holders. There is a smart if somewhat dull, white, china cup, a shiny black receptacle which I imagine appeals to the type of person who has silk sheets and an unhealthy penchant for leopard print, and then there is a very stylish brushed steel tube. This is without doubt the toothbrush holder for me. It speaks of a certain understated style. It is masculine without being macho, functional and yet it communicates something positive that I can’t quite put my finger on about its owner. It is the Audi of toothbrush holders. I reach it down from the shelf and look at the base to check the price.

And that is when I see it! My toothbrush holder has a name. On the sticky white label alongside the bar code and the seemingly random jumble of numbers is the word “aspirational”.  “Aspirational!” I feel insulted; belittled. Do the people at Homebase really believe that my life is so small, that my horizons are so narrow and my ambitions so limited that I lie in bed at night dreaming of owning a toothbrush holder? When Martin Luther King proclaimed that he had a dream was it that his toothbrush should be contained in a stylish metal cup? No it was not, and while I don’t claim to have such lofty ambitions as MLK I flatter myself that my sights are set slightly higher than the bathroom shelf.

I imagine the chino wearing designers grasping espressos as they clap each other on the back at Homebase HQ. “Oh I think we’ve cracked it this time guys!” they say to each other. “Absolutely smashed it! This is most definitely the toothbrush holder for anybody with the faintest desire for self improvement,” they assure each other. “What shall we call it?” they ask. Then almost simultaneously the same word occurs to each of them and rises from the group as one utterance, “ASPIRATIONAL”. They applaud themselves and decide to nip off to Nandos for a celebratory lunch.

I look at the toothbrush holder. I suppose it is rather neat and if I scrape of the label no-one need ever know that my horizons are defined by my toothbrush holder.

Back home I enter the bathroom. Small balls of hair are rolling across the floor like tumbleweed.  I curse the hairy tramp and put my new toothbrush holder on the sink. I put my toothbrush and toothpaste in the holder and stand back. There is no denying that it looks good. It is a small step on my upward trajectory.