The Coffee Table

When I was twenty, I worked in Oliver Bonas on Kensington Church Street, directly under Anna Bonas herself. The stock never impressed me — torpedo shot glasses, plaster casts of Michelangelo’s David (nose, eye, or mouth, take your pick), cheap mirrors, paper-weights, shelves, and, of course, pashminas, which were practically a currency in those days. Yet the stuff flew off the shelves.

I lived in Willesden Junction then, cycling into town, working out at Holmes Place off Ladbroke Grove (where Geri Halliwell occasionally worked up a sweat). I’d spot Tricky exhaling plumes of skunk before slipping into a tinted Mercedes Jeep, Damon Albarn meeting Jamie Hewlett as Gorillaz was still embryonic, Paul Smith rifling through Portobello for inspiration, Ruby Wax choosing VHS tapes at the rental near Notting Hill Gate. My own centre of gravity was north of the station, poking through vintage shops. But my paycheque came from Bonas.

Anna and Oliver were ambitious, creative, open to ideas — until they realised my ideas generally involved telling them their taste was terrible. Still, I wrote the labels, manned the till, dashed into the storeroom for more tat to sate the appetite of the buying public.

Then Brian Sewell walked in. I had only recently seen him on Channel 4’s J’accuse, where public intellectuals were invited to denounce cultural idols. Sewell had chosen Leonardo da Vinci, dismissing him with a story of inflating a goat's intestines in a small room until it pressed its audience against the walls — a cheap circus trick, not genius. I adored the spectacle of it. No sacred cows, no reverence for reputation. He believed in the real skill of painters, would take a Stubbs over a Tàpies any day. Even though I could see value in both, I envied his unflinching certainty.

And yet, when Sewell and his much younger companion made straight for a hulking Indonesian coffee table — darkly stained, clumsy, tourist-naïf — my own convictions got the better of me. They admired it. Worse, they wanted to buy it. I blurted: “Are you sure?”

It was a grotesque piece, the kind of thing backpackers might purchase after “finding themselves” at a Jakarta shrine to the god of cigarettes. But as soon as the words escaped, I turned to catch Anna’s scowl — the scowl of a woman who knew what business we were in, and what business I was not.

Sewell was unmoved. I rang up the sale, helped trundle the beast onto a waiting SUV, and imagined the two of them christening it later. A coffee table destined not for coffee but for something far more intimate.

Not long after, Anna kindly concluded I wasn’t quite cut out for retail. She was right. I admired conviction in others, but in that shop, mine was misplaced. A vile table to me, but to them — and more importantly to the till — a perfect one.