Let me make this clear ...

 ... why glass furniture is not for me. Originally published in The Big Issue.  

Isn’t glass lovely? It lets the light in and keeps the weather out. It wraps itself so tenderly round important stuff, like beer. It’s smooth and subtle and almost invisible and if it didn’t exist we’d be such a miserable lot. We’d all be sitting around in windowless buildings drinking beer out of our shoes.

But I’m concerned for glass. I keep seeing it in all the wrong places. I keep seeing it being used in ways I can barely bring myself to mention. But I’m going to. Because the world has to hear these things. I refer, first and foremost, to glass-top tables. Tables made of glass. I mean, I suppose it would be handy to have a glass-top table if a dinner guest had passed out and slipped off their chair and you wanted to be able to check for foggy patches to see if they were still breathing. Apart from that, what possible reason is there for propping a great slab of glass on four legs and calling it a dinner table?

Like I said, I’m all for glass on the vertical. It works very nicely in windows and has done for a long time now. But glass on the horizontal? That’s bordering on homicidal. Just placing my drink on a glass-top table makes me shudder. There’s something so unnerving about glass against glass.

To me, that little glassy squeak screams disaster. Why would anybody want a coffee table that doubles as a lethal weapon; a near-invisible rectangle hovering in the middle of the room, lurking menacingly, just below the knee?

I recently stayed in a place that had not only a glass-top dinner table but also a glass-top bench and a glass-top coffee table. What with the glass shower screen, the glass chopping board and the glass balcony panels, I was half expecting a glass toilet seat. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate in classy glass? Sure, it could do your nether regions serious harm but not if you were really, really careful.

In my experience, glass has a tendency to break. Shatter into a thousand razor-sharp pieces, even. Which makes it a less-than-ideal material for furniture making. I would have thought. Pubic hair doesn’t shatter. Why not fashion a table out of pubic hair instead? It may not be pretty, but it’s less likely to sever major arteries.

Oh, then there’s timber. Unfashionable, I know, but it’s probably no coincidence that, traditionally, wooden tables have outnumbered glass ones. In much the same way that windows have tended to be made of glass, as opposed to, say, planks of mahogany, which do keep the weather out but can be a little difficult to see through.

Of course, owners of glass furniture must know all this. Just the other day I saw a huge glass dining table in a furniture shop. Next to the equally huge price tag there was a small, handwritten sign. It said: ‘Do Not Place Anything On This Table.’ Just what the world needs.

Maybe glass furniture is popular because it’s so not cosy. Because cold, hard surfaces are in and soft and comfortable is out. But what exactly is the attraction of a table that can shatter into a million lethal shards at a moment’s notice? Are owners of glass furniture really so sure-footed that they can dodge all those bevelled edges? Do they not need soft furnishings, if only to break their fall in the middle of the night when they trip over the cat on their way to the loo?

There I was thinking the rooms we live in should be kind of cuddly; that furniture should be forgiving. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s glass or it’s nothing. So, ever the fashion victim, I’m redecorating. I’ve run up some curtains made of razorblades and had the couch reupholstered in a stunningly coarse grain of sandpaper. And you should see my glass underpants. They’re not cosy, but gee they’re easy to clean.