Core memories

My neck, my back

I miss my sofa. 

I still have my sofa, to be clear. It’s the same one everyone bought circa 2018, the velvet one with the cylindrical cushions? You know the one, you’ve sat on it at half a dozen parties. You’ve spilled Perello juice on it and mopped it up with a chore jacket. 

Good times have been had on that sofa, though very few in the manner you’re thinking. I have laughed and cried and eaten noodles on that sofa. I have napped on that sofa’s strokeable nap. I spent most of the pandemic on that sofa, letting the cushions slip incrementally further and further forward until it eventually spat me onto the floor and I would be forced to go to the effort of hoisting them back into place. Sometimes that was my daily exercise.

In the early months of last year the sofa and I were virtually inseparable. It was where I fed the baby and my husband fed me, in beautiful symbiosis, shovelling Cook meals into my mouth twice a day in front of Richard Osman’s House of Games. It was where I received g…