HAVE your retired parents suddenly discovered they have money? Here are the unnecessarily expensive home goods they’ll start feeling the need to acquire.
Curtains
Blocking out the weak glow of barely functioning streetlights does not require luxury items, but your parents bought super-expensive curtains anyway. Apart from being an incredibly dull purchase, they justified it because the pattern was ‘lovely’. And that’s what you want from a piece of fabric that’s only on show when you’re asleep.
Dining tables
What better thing to waste money on than wood, the material that literally grows on trees? They weren’t rushing to give you cash when you genuinely needed a bail-out, but apparently when it comes to a table you sit at once a year for Christmas it turns out the sky’s the limit. You are loved less by your parents than a lump of dead tree.
Gym equipment
A state-of-the-art rowing machine is just what two rapidly ageing pensioners with joint problems and an aversion to movement need. They could have got someone’s old exercise bike for a fraction of the price, but that wouldn’t look as nice gathering dust in the spare room.
‘Art’
With too much time on their hands, buying overpriced tat to clutter up their house can now be passed off as ‘collecting’. Before you know it, every room will be dripping with twee watercolours and ugly vases that should be smashed with a hammer. Your mum thinks she’s got an original Henry Moore and your dad thinks he’s Charles Saatchi thanks to a figurine of a pheasant on the mantlepiece.
Garden furniture
There are definitely cheaper ways to fill up the shed, but for your folks only a set of pricey chairs will do. On rare hot days they won’t bother to drag them outside anyway and will just watch TV in the lounge with the doors open. Undeterred, they’ve now got plans for a patio involving builders and gas heaters, just in case there’s any of your inheritance left.
