Town mouse loves antiques
While his house is being refurbished, Clive idly considers investing in antiques


We're at that point in the middle of a building project when we wish we'd never started. I shouldn't complain. A friend of ours has spent 10 months confined, with the rest of his family and a gas ring, to a single room, as an extension is added. We've only had to go a month without functional use of our basement. But we're becoming impatient to repossess the nether parts, whose contents have risen like a wave of volcanic magma and spread throughout the house.
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Inconvenience on this scale doesn't come cheap. I've just bought a small sofa that can now, due to the reorganisation, squeeze its tubby way into my study. When installed, I shall be able to read with the focus so manifest in occupants of the London Library's leather chairs and wake refreshed.
The sweet mahogany morsel that I found on eBay went for just over half what it will cost to repaint the front door. Obviously, we've got our priorities wrong. We should give up the house, live in a tent and surround ourselves with Edwardian love seats, on the grounds that they must go up in price some time. To keep warm, we could break up some of the furniture and throw it on the fire.
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Country Life is unlike any other magazine: the only glossy weekly on the newsstand and the only magazine that has been guest-edited by HRH The King not once, but twice. It is a celebration of modern rural life and all its diverse joys and pleasures — that was first published in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year. Our eclectic mixture of witty and informative content — from the most up-to-date property news and commentary and a coveted glimpse inside some of the UK's best houses and gardens, to gardening, the arts and interior design, written by experts in their field — still cannot be found in print or online, anywhere else.
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