Eileen Gray moves into our flat

Remember me telling you that Her Indoors had ordered an Eileen Gray 'style' chair sometime before Christmas? Well it arrived yesterday.

I had been into darkest Somerset to order some stone from a supplier of the Ham Hill variety (whose quarry license had expired, leaving him with no stone at all... but that's another story), and had driven past the 'Mendip Shooting Ground', so I took the opportunity of stocking-up on shotgun cartridges by buying two boxes of 250 each (that's 500, for those of you who are as bad at maths as I am).

I don't know if you realise how heavy these little boxes are, but each cartridge contains about 28 grams of lead, so this and the rest of the components mean that struggling to the top floor entrance of our compact but adorable city apartment with 500 of them is a little tiring.

When I got to the doorway on the top landing, I found a 5 foot square, thick, cardboard box blocking the entrance, and had to cut it apart with a knife before I could get in. This was as far as the poor man who delivered the chair could get, and H.I. had spent the previous hour cutting the contents out of the box with a little knife of her own (from the other side), so was as exhausted as me.

It's rather elegant isn't it? Of course, being based on a design by Eileen Gray, there are a few details which do not tally with the original, but it is extremely comfortable to sit in and still looks good.

Since H.I. can differentiate between about 500 more shades of white than your average Inuit, the colour isn't quite right for her, but I soon managed to get her to shut up about that. If you live with a Virgo painter, you will know what I have to put up with.

So this is now her official painting chair, and the chair in which she will sit to watch DVDs on this very computor. I will have to make do with a hard wooden job. I am - I have to reluctantly admit - now a little jealous.