Even though he’s a urinalysis observer by trade and rarely leaves the crepuscular bowels of the supermax correctional facility where he works, my friend Agamemnon is a natural born interior design savant. It’s why this Monday I was dragging old Agster ‘round Marital HQ on a Skypetour. I wanted his gimlet peepers scoping the recent renos me and The Hubster slaved over in lieu of having human children. After months of schvitzing up and down the ‘Tung looking for non-slip tiles that don’t feature a gold ‘n’ pebble Hang Ten motif, paintbrushes that won’t shed like a box of cats, and mirrors free from any kind of frosted swan, sailboat and/or dolphin combo, our revamped Love Pod was ready for wi-fives from my wine-dark Interior Tastemaker. Followed by an orgy of self-aggrandising Instagram uploads from Yours Truly.
So through the magic of technology here I was in CharmingVille flouncing around in a pomegranate kaftan, brandishing a laptop and half a jug of Tijuana Hookers while, 8,000 miles away, my personal ornamentalist sat in a dank bunker behind a 3-centimetre plexiglass screen simultaneously watching convicted felons wee into paper cups and inspecting the first objet in our domestic odyssey: the enormous driftwood mobile strung up in our porte cochere. I was a bit nervous. My gruff Greek DIY oracle shuns shabby chic, urban industrial, and mid-century modern. He spits on artfully arranged vignettes like, say, the vintage drinks trolley under the mounted antlers, the cluster of seven variously framed nudes on the teal feature wall, and the rusty je ne sais quoi reclaimed from a. an abandoned mental asylum, b. a disused fair ground or c. Chernobyl mounted next to the fiddle-leaf fig planted in the upcycled Victorian birthing chair. And don’t get him started on terrariums. Damn those succulents. He sees one more midget fucking garden in a mason jar he’ll take it and smash its living daylights out like an Aegean wedding guest gone mad. He has an exacting penchant for Nordic trapper luxe, as do I, and though a nipple-deep Fuglestad bathroom mat may not be climate-appropriate BodeSide, I knew from his enraptured gaze I’d scored the first of many mammoth stamps. Apparently it was “EV.ER.Y.THING!” Ditto the feature chair hewn from a single piece of Eyjafjallajökull pumice, and the scrimshaw headboard depicting the Oratory at Gröf I’d schlepped all the way back from last year’s Spitzburgen Sturgeon Muster. Ags was all aboard my Scandi bus and high on the birch stink until, flustered by technology and my third goblet of tequila and pickle juice hipster fail, I accidentally panned the webcam too far past the prahok jar trivet fashioned from a decommissioned bear trap. Behold our balcony undone. Our decrepit, sun struck terrace of shame has as much kerb appeal as Gold Tower 42. Before I could think of a distraction and only managed “Aeon has ceramic swans with air ferns in them!” my Hellenic muse, lip curled, pointed past the replica narwhal couchette and out through the willow-wood doors. “I’m no fucking Sparta,” he hissed through his bristling chin thicket, “But what the hell is that?”
Okay, so sure it’s a glitter cactus from the plant bit in Central Market. I don’t know if you’ve seen them. They‘re cactuses with their spines painted with white glue then blue glitter sprinkled on them, and they’re $3.50. This spangled fancy is the last hope for what I like to think of as our urban re-wilding project, if Phnom Penh used to look like a Smurf disco in the Mojave Desert. It’s not a homeware I would ever choose for myself, but I thought its festive spines might gee up my fungal tomato plants and the Hubster’s wilting winter melon-choko-squash thing that neither of us has ever eaten before in our lives. They were the only seeds that hadn’t expired their use-by-date at the pesticide bodega in O’Russei. It gets depressing when you go out in the morning to spy on the guy on the opposite balcony practicing his karaoke face in a shaving mirror and find woolly white thrips, like Lilliputian Finnish flocks, sucking the lifejuice from our sorry vines.
Hubster is the son of a farm family, and I have generations of Roundup running through my veins, so we both hanker to live off the land. But like everyone’s aerial overhang in central Pnomps, there’s no actual soil in sight – it’s a monkey’s breakfast of mops, washing line, broken furniture, three surplus tiles, an inexplicable brick, someone’s old Pikachu tank top, and an assortment of pots and plants in various states of decay. In my head it’s a tasteful, sub-arctic Pinterest Board called “Garden of Wonder” but in real life it’s a paean to brown thumbs and green intentions gone to seed. The only redeeming feature is a sparrow horde that feasts on the weevilly rice I put out every day. I’ve tried tovikingise out there – my Georg Jensen tureen is now a capacious birdbath which becomes an avian geothermal spa even as the sun beats me and the Hubster back inside to our arctic A/C and reindeer throw. It’s then those little chitterlings come hopping and fluffing, dipping their panting beaks and showering our blighted outdoors in happy chirps. For them it’s like a Jacuzzi in Skútustaðahreppur. Or a day at the beach in the Dodecanese.