Real life | 23 June 2012

‘Have you thought about moving these sofas around?’ asked the builder boyfriend. ‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re identical. There’s no point.’ ‘They’re not identical. One is a sofa bed and slightly bigger. It would fit better if they were the other way around.’ ‘Please leave them,’ I said. ‘I like them the way they are.’

‘But the bigger one doesn’t fit in the window. It should be where the smaller one is. That would make it so much better. Don’t you want it to be better?’

No, I don’t. That’s the whole point. I don’t want things to get better, I just want them to stay the same.

I’m the sort of conservative who wants things never to change, even, or especially, if that means them not getting better. Deep down, I think this is because I suspect that when something ‘gets better’ it actually gets a lot worse.

As such, when people offer to upgrade my package, or send me a better model — of anything, even if it’s free — I say no, thank you, I prefer to keep the old one.

When BT rings to offer me super-fast fibre-optic broadband, I say absolutely not, I’m very pleased with the rubbish slow broadband. Because I know in my heart that the fibre-optic broadband will somehow manage to make my life worse, under the guise of making it better.

I tried to explain all this to the builder boyfriend but he didn’t look convinced. He’s one of those damned eternal optimists who thinks he can make everything better.

I knew he was going to make the sofas fit better in spite of me, but I assumed I would notice him doing it. I didn’t.

What happened was that weeks after the sofa conversation my young cousin arrived to stay and because I have a friend in the spare room the cousin had to sleep on the sofa bed.