As if we needed any more proof that my life is a shitty sitcom, written by someone with a very poor imagination, today my wife and I tried to move a sofa from a bedroom to the basement and guess what happened? You'll never guess. Oh you guessed. We got it stuck. Not just stuck, seemingly impossibly lodged in the space at the top of the stairs down to the cellar. We got it in there so surely we could get it out? No, you're wrong. We couldn't. Maybe someone stronger with a better grasp of three dimensions could, but we couldn't.
I have never been good with visualising things in three dimensions - in fact I can barely cope with two. I like to think about stuff in one dimension ideally. I am good with that. Which ever way I turn that one dimension I can comprehend it. But in IQ tests, something I am good at for the most part, if I am asked to match two cubes or to construct a cube out of a flat template I am lost.
I didn't want to move the sofa. I wanted to buy a new one, mainly to avoid this very scenario. Because proper men would have to deliver it and proper men can visualise in 3D and get sofas through tight spaces. But the new door to our basement is quite narrow. Narrower than most sofas and I realised that with the legs off our old sofa would fit through the door and so decided to save a few hundred quid and get the thing downstairs ourselves.
I had attempted to imagine the journey in advance, to work out when we'd need to turn it on its end and when we'd have to back through a door. But as it happened my plans were all not good. We had to adapt as we went. We got the sofa down two flights of stairs with little to no serious incident. In fact we skillfully worked together to squeeze it down. But will people remember our two successful flights of stairs? No, they will just go on about the unsuccessful one won't they?
We got the sofa to the last turn and it was a tricky one. It was a sharper angle and there was the added difficulty of the ceiling height changing as we were not going underneath the stairs that we'd just come down. We needed to think pretty carefully about which way to turn the thing and how it would fit. I thought that it would only work if it was on its end again, but in my dimension addled head we'd have to do two 90 degree turns to get it round. I can't remember exactly what we did, though we got the sofa half through the kitchen door which gave us the leverage to stand it longways on the step outside. But the sofa was still resting on two stairs and we had to push and poke it in order to get it all down on to the kitchen level step. But somehow we squeezed it on. We were almost punching the air with glee at our skill, though of course this manoeuvre was to be our undoing. It had been hard to get the sofa down this far, but gravity had been on our side. It was going to be a lot harder to get it back again. But who wanted to go back? We were going down. Except we weren't, because the sofa needed to twist through another 90 degrees and in its current position was too wide to make it down the stairs. And we couldn't twist it because of the ceiling above it, that was getting buffeted and then hit and then plaster and paint fell down - much funnier in the sitcom of course because the house was only decorated two weeks ago. We were destroying all the hard work and also had a sofa blocking the door to our kitchen and the stairs to our basement.
It was incredibly frustrating and upsetting of course. I felt emasculated. A husband should be able to work out this kind of stuff. Would my wife be tempted to leave me for another? And would she be instituting some kind of spatial awareness and 3D IQ test for any future suitors. We pushed and pulled. Luckily we could get into the kitchen through another door and we could squeeze down the stairs so we could look at this from lots of angles. I considered trying to remove the arms of the sofa and found the bolts, but it was also glued and sewn together and whilst we might be able to reconstruct it, we very well might not be able to. After forty minutes of trying to swivel it back and of vainly trying to instruct each other what needed to be done (hard to do when neither of us could see the whole problem at once, steps, ceiling, door frame and various corners of sofa were jamming and crunching. I was so cross about it that I was on the verge of just taking an axe to the thing. But I didn't have an axe. And if I went out and got one in the morning I would probably just use it to castrate myself. I might as well. I had already revealed the extent of my non-masculinity to the woman who had married me.
I went and sat in the garden to cool down and think. But there was no point in thinking. I had no clue as to what would help us. I would need to get some proper men in and face the humiliation of them judging me and laughing at me and feeling sorry for my wife. My wife might even just leave with them once they'd solved the problem.
My only way to control the situation was to take some photos and tweet them so I could let the world know of my shame on my terms. If I could make people laugh then my role would be validated. If I could get a routine or a newspaper column or even a blog out of it then that might go someway to paying for the damage that had already occurred. But it was horrible to feel so impotent. And in my heart I knew that the trapped sofa motif has been done enough times for me to know that there was probably little original that I could do with it.
I hoped Twitter might provide some answer to this real life rubik's cube, but if I can't think in 3 dimensions then I am hardly going to understand a 140 character solution from people who couldn't see the full extent of the problem. I got a lot of people telling me what the situation was like (Dirk Gently, Friends, Bernard Cribbins' "Right Said Fred", the PG Tips Chimps, the Chuckle Brothers) - this just confirmed how well trod a comedic situation it was. I got some advice about swinging the sofa round from the top right hand corner and edging it back up the steps. But this is what we'd been trying to do. I wondered if we could get away with just leaving the sofa where it was. It would be a talking point and a weird work of art and when pushed right into the corner left enough room to get into the kitchen and downstairs.
Eventually my wife cooked some dinner and we decided to leave it as it was. It had entertained some people on Twitter at least. We had created laughter, though none of it from us. I wanted to cry. I'd have been quite happy to die in fact. I would probably have given the deeds to my house to any man (or woman) capable of freeing me from this nightmare. I was utterly humiliated and broken. And tired from wrestling with a sofa for the best part of two hours. I just needed a good sit down. But would have to do so in the wrong axis. I was the Lord of the Dunce Settee.
I actually think it would be quite hard for someone with brilliant spatial awareness to have so successfully got this sofa into a position where it was so effectively trapped. So in a way having managed that makes me better than a real man. In a way. I will be interested to see if the men we call out will be able to save the settee (I think we might have to dismantle it) and if they will be able to get it down the stairs (I think if we'd managed to turn it when it was in the kitchen that the last stage might have been relatively easy). I am also quite keen to let no one know about it and just see if we get used to the sofa being there. If it stays for a week then I think there's every chance that it might stay there forever. A testament to my lack of manliness. Or an artistic statement about my supposed "femininity".
It's a shame because we also went to the Yoko Ono exhibition at the Serpentine gallery today, which was excellent and I'd love to have written a blog about that. But there's no time now. The sofa is still trapped. How many days will it take to free/destroy it?
