A Telly Room Of Our Own

As Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own turns 90, Mary Killen and Giles Wood from Gogglebox write about…

Mary

I’m very grateful to have a roof over my head – but ecstatic happiness tends more frequently to occur in other people’s houses or in hotels. I find so much to grumble about in my own.

One day, as I was grumbling to a psychotherapist friend, she told me one’s house is a metaphor for oneself. It wasn’t that my house was cluttered and disorganised – my brain was. I had to agree.

I’ve been thinking about these things because this autumn marks the 90th anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own. In it, Woolf declares, ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’

The television-watching room which features on Gogglebox is probably the least unsatisfactory room in our Wiltshire cottage. Regarding its William Morris theme, I once wrote an article about the top ten taste-brokers in London. They included antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs, decorator Robert Kime and Lady Amabel Lindsay, widow of Christie’s director Patrick Lindsay. The one thing the ten had in common was that they all had one room in their house decorated in the same William Morris willow pattern. I immediately ordered it from Dible & Roy in Marlborough. The lounging chair, also in willow pattern, does make us look a bit obsessive on television but we are not the sort of family who buy our own furniture – we accept other people’s. Ditto the curtains, also willow pattern, off camera. A neighbour, assuming we were obsessive William Morrisites, donated those.