Daily Blague

Kathleen and I have dried our tears; we are ready to get on with the day. We cried ourselves silly over Joyce Wadler's piece in today's House & Home section, "It's Not You, It's Your Apartment." New York is a tough town. You're good-looking, you're successful, you don't ask your date to help pay the bill - what could go wrong? Well, you could stop by your house to pick up an umbrella and, getting a little distracted, lead her up to your bedroom in the attic. Innocently, of course!

"We walked up three flights of stair to the attic," she says. "It looked like a teenager's room. The computer was up there and the twin bed, his clothes were all over the floor. I was like, uuuuuh-huuuuh. He didn't even seem sorry that he lived in a 12-year-old boy's room, this was like normal behavior. It said to me, this person is not grown up yet. It was frightening. He's lived his whole life in the attic."

But it wasn't the stories of home-decor disaster that reduced us to tears; it was Ms Wadler's excellent writing. The extract just quoted comes from a section headed, "There Is a Reason Nice Buildings Are Not Named for Norman Bates." Even better:

Spring is here and the restaurants will soon be filled with anxious and hopeful couples, ordering wine, dusting off their most luminous lies, thinking they might finally have found love. Then they will see their dates' homes for the first time. And suddenly some of them will realize that they cannot be with this person a moment longer..."

There are some real characters, as we say in Gotham, in Ms Wadler's menagerie of I'll-do-it-my-way Martha Stewarts - most of whom, by the way, are men. There's Albert Podell, the well-to-do septuagenarian lawyer who has somehow managed to preserve cartoon-themed bedding for nearly forty years. (I know the secret, but it's too disgusting to repeat.) There's Bob Strauss, happily smiling as he holds up the stuffed baby seal (not a toy) that he inherited from relatives in Miami. Most touchingly, there's Evan Lobel, the modern-furniture merchant who thought that what his boyfriend would really like when he got back from a Peace Corps stint was a $2.4 million loft with a $25,000 chandelier.

Aaaaannnnnhhh!

"He said, 'What is this? I can't live in a place like this. I was just around people who were hungry and dying'," Mr Lobel says. "In the end we were breaking up. For a while I regretted even buying that apartment."

Thank goodness he got over the regret!