The news that a Japanese, Mr Yoshiro Nakamats, has invented a chair that will improve a person’s thinking is guaranteed to send people like me clean off their rockers.
He claims that his chair emits infra-red rays and vibrations from a platform at its base and stimulates the brain.
There is a general consensus that I have little brain to stimulate and that the Japanese inventor would be wasting his time infra- readying me for anything more than the slight vibration of my television tea tray.
It seems a shame that this last refuge of repose, this article of furniture into which people are always collapsing, is to be made into something, approaching one of the more horrific devices of Dr. Who.
The chair, sprawling, cushioned and comfort able has for years been harbouring bottoms (steady, Mr. Howard) and earning our heartfelt flanks.
Now comes the horrendous prospect of the brain-washed chairperson.
As I said to my chair, patting it reassuringly, life wasn’t meant to be easy.
It’s no wonder my chair and I are apprehensive. There is a bond between us. We sit for hours with our arms around each other, fearing the worst.
Where will Mr. Yoshiro strike next? Already my family is ringing Tokyo with plans for a domestic seat. You pull a lever and the chairperson is hurled into the garden, with uncanny accuracy, right alongside the spade and wheelbarrow.
I’ll admit I have been possessive about my chair.
If I find other people sitting in it, I scream, “Hams off.”
Naturally, I’m put down as an eccentric. Other chairpersons shun me as moribund, a man whose very trousers remain seated even when he has risen.
But all’s chair in love and war they say, giggling hysterically.
I ask you, does Mr. Yoshiro come home at night to the soft scent of cherry blossoms and the snow-capped backdrop of Mount Fuji and settle thankfully in his chair only to be bombarded with infra-red rays and shaken to his socks by Nipponese vibrations, spilling his saki and slopping his sukiyaki?
One can’t help wondering. And, if he does, all I can say is serve the honourable sir right!
So my chair and I intend to stand firm and to sit this one out.
We are even thinking of enlisting protest groups; angry adherents chairing meetings and meeting chairs.
The chair, after all, is part of the indoor environment and the haunt of some rare old birds.
And what about that unspoilt chair of the countryside, that relic of the primitive outdoors—the chair on the homestead verandah.
I get some good vibrations, without any electronic assistance when I’m in the country sitting in the verandah chair and looking across the buffalo lawn to the hay shed and the hand distant hazy hills.
The verandah chair usually has a bit of stuffing showing, its innards gritty with the last dust storm, its mock leather sides cracked and parched by westering suns.
Farmers have nursed their children in this chair, agents have nursed their grievances.
Mothers have sat waiting for the homeward heading of the tractor.
Verandah chairs are full of folklore to say nothing of the indigenous redback.
Nostalgia seeps from every spring. Why not watch the sunset (what, no infra-red?) as it flares and fusses in the west until night unrolls its canopy of stars?
Incidentally, the last country chair I 1 sat in belonged to a sheepdog
I learnt this when the dog took my foot in its jaws and gave me vibrations that would have sent Mr. Yoshiro racing to his calculator.
“You’ve got old Shep’s chair,” my host said accusingly
Now when I visit that particular verandah there’s one thing I always avoid
The chair of the dog that bit me!
Max Fatchen