Food For Thought!

It appears we have reached the point in ‘Mi Casa’, where we need to redecorate the lounge... No issues there, as the car is built, IVA is history, the garage is neat-and-tidy and properly hoovered, and my upgrade ‘to do’ list is well under control.

So, having no credible excuse, I decided to top up my Fake Snake brown-point piggy bank, and go with the flow… And a couple of weeks later, all was well in hand and agreed: wall colour ✅; new curtains ✅; new carpet ✅; new sofas ✅; new light fittings ✅.

Then, settling down with my DIY and decorating lists to plan my strategy with the same dubious and precarious precision I used when I planned my car build, I got thinking about the sofas… So I needed to reverify!

“What’s wrong with the sofas we have?” I feebly enquired. “They’re only twenty years old and still going strong… They are classics!”

Nope 😩… Not a chance to debate; the decision was sound, so it was simply down to the ‘what’, and it was off to the shops to find out what was ‘Sofa Du Jour.’

Cloth, leather, that tacky stuff they have in some hotels; static, reclining, arms, no arms, table inserts and a thousand combinations thereof.

Wall-hugging, non-wall-hugging, reclining options of manual, electric or battery-powered mechanisms (yes, they are available now): two-seater; two-and-a-half-seater; wrap-around seating with an nth number of reversible cushions; 21, 24, 31, 33 grade leather or hand-woven twill made from wool kindly donated by acorn-fed virgin sheep from some obscure island off the coast of some far-off land.

And the colours were pure fantasy: Aqua Marine Shimmer, Pre-Dawn Orange; Peripatetic Oyster; and Moon Glow Grey being just a few… And I really, really, really had to resist asking if they had ‘Death-Cap Mushroom Red’ or ‘Ghostbuster Green’ or ‘RAL 9005’ (which in my sofa-sales catalogue would be listed as ‘Death Star Deep-Shadow Onyx’). 😂

And asking what fuse rating and what the Ah drain rate is on the battery version of the recliner, or if they used thin-walled cabling, I knew would be a line of enquiry that I should not pursue.

And get this… I could hardly believe my ears when the salesperson described in great detail the differences between South African and European Cows and the environmental influences affecting the leather. E.g.… [No, I won’t go into it; PM me if you really want to know].

So how does all this fit in with my Cobra and me?

Just as I was about to throw in the towel, the salesperson said: “And we have a range of leather care kits that we recommend to feed, nourish and moisturise your new suite... Leather, being a natural product, can dry out, fade, crack or discolour over time if not fed and cleansed with a moisturising agent twice a year.”

Now he properly had my attention! How many of us have given a passing thought as to the state of the leather seats in our trusty steeds? And how many of us go anywhere near them with anything more moisturising than a squeezed-out soapy sponge?

Our leather seats are open to all sorts of environmental influences, and we do take them for granted.

So back to the plot, and I have noticed over the last year my seats have become shinier and slightly less vibrant in the posterior position…

Pity, I was about to link our planetary cyclic position in the Sunspot Cycle with the colour-fading properties of different quality leathers, but alas, it wasn’t to be 😆.

So, using this as my covert line of enquiry, I started to follow up with a series of loosely associated questions. But the missus picked up on this very quickly and nipped it in the bud and got us back on track… 

To conclude, and having now looked into this leather moisturising malarkey, I will be treating the seats with more than a clean-ish micro-cloth and a quick rub-down with a squeezed-out soapy sponge; and I’ll be extra vigilant and caring when they are damp from me not paying enough attention to the weather forecast... Now where did I put that moisturiser!