Magnolia paint, ‘pops of colour’ and carpet. My decor is dated — horror!

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.
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I need to confess something terrible so I’ll just come out with it. I have a matching three-piece suite.
Yes, give me your scorn, give me your mockery. I own a settee and two chairs in the same fabric: I am a basic bitch. For how “cool” this makes me, I might as well be an old biddy protecting her perm in a hairnet.
Perhaps you also have a three-piece suite, possibly bought from DFS in the sale that they say will “end on Sunday” yet it never, ever does. If so, you may wish to consider whether you even deserve to live. Because it is a decor atrocity. It is “boringly matchy-matchy” and made even worse by “identikit cushions in the same material”, another crime of which I am 100 per cent guilty.
This at least is according to Michelle Ogundehin, head judge on the BBC’s Interior Design Masters, who has listed 11 “tired trends making your home look dated”. Devastatingly, I have more than half of them. I very much like Michelle and I enjoy that TV show. So it hurts, Michelle, it hurts.
OK, I don’t have “fussy pelmets” or any rooms in grey, which she says is a colour suitable only for school jumpers and Holiday Inn carpets. I don’t have a black sink and taps, which Michelle says is a no-no. Although, between us, I wouldn’t mind one. Better than stainless steel.
But I do have “feature alcoves” (a “half-hearted” effort), wall to wall carpets, white bed sheets and the odd unframed piece of art. I have also used a “pop of colour” in rooms, which she says is like wearing a badge saying, “I’m quirky!” (not gonna lie, that one cut deep, Michelle). And I definitely have “rubbish radiators”. God, they’re ugly, the living room’s equivalent of a throbbing buttock boil. But if I replace them with (pricey) underfloor heating as she suggests, where will I dry my knickers in winter? I’m not sure people are thinking this through.
A quick google of interior design websites suggests their experts agree with Michelle, adding other abominations such as too-small rugs, yellow bedrooms (guilty again!), Artex ceilings and ginormous canvases of babies.
But hold on. What about the worst atrocity? Namely circular paper lanterns. At my design magazine, Basic Bitch Interiors, even we losers draw the line at them (although we see nothing wrong with magnolia paint. “You never regret dull magnolia. You don’t even notice it!” our expert says). Once I ranted to a friend about how depressingly studenty paper lanterns look, then noticed she’d gone quiet. She had two upstairs, two downstairs. Awkward.
And net curtains: why no mention of these horrors, the prissy crinoline toilet roll holders of window dressing? And overhead spotlights sunk into the ceiling, which make everyone look like a decaying corpse? Or coloured pebbles in bowls, faux chandeliers, anything that’s been crocheted, especially hideous sofa throws (“Kill me now!” says our other expert, who happens to be me).
What’s so great about mismatched furniture anyway? Boris Johnson’s wife, Carrie, railed against Theresa May’s “John Lewis nightmare” when she moved into Downing Street. But I like John Lewis. Sue me. Fashionistas may think it’s cool to mix a striped sofa with flowery armchairs and a spotty carpet but I’d feel I was living in a care home furnished from a church jumble sale. Actually I’d feel like I was living with Colin Hunt from The Fast Show.
So, as I was saying as I plumped my plain scatter cushions, my three-piece suite and I may be boring but we are at peace with it. Read our exclusive, very bland interview only in Basic Bitch Interiors.
Congratulations, Curtis and Arthur, a pair of “gay” flamingos who incubated and hatched an abandoned egg at Paignton Zoo in Devon and are now raising the chick as their own. Lovely story. Although if the mother asks for it back, they won’t have a leg to stand on. (Sorry, terrible joke.)
Guido and Detlef, vultures at a zoo in Münster, Germany, were less lucky. They were split up and forced to go straight to mate with females. How sad. But not as sad as accusing humans of turning your lions gay. In 2017 a Kenyan official knew exactly who to blame for two male lions having enthusiastic sex in the Masai Mara reserve. They had watched gay tourists “behaving badly” in the park and copied them. By this logic, it’s just as well we don’t have lions in the UK. By now they’d be dogging in a Vauxhall Astra in a car park off the A417.
Like “edgy” car bumper stickers? Bad news, then: you’re a psychopath. Do you wear T-shirts bearing political slogans such as “Brexit and proud!” or “Tories: putting the ‘N’ in Cuts”? Then, sorry, you may be unhinged.
Don’t blame me, blame a US study that found that people who engage in “ideological poking”, displaying messages to bait their opponents, score highly for psychopathic tendencies. Not surprised. But why just pick on them? What about those sad souls who display signs reading, “Honk if you’re horny!” Or “Carpet fitters do it on their knees!!!” Imagine feeling you must advertise your sex life via your Ford Mondeo. (How do windsurfers do it? Yes! Standing up.)
“Baby on board” signs get a lot of stick and deservedly so as a) they are smugly annoying and b) suggest road traffic accidents are somehow optional. Your bumper sticker is not a personality. The only acceptable ones, in my view, are those that have been stuck on to punish an oblivious bad driver. Such as “I drive like a c*** because I am one” and, the winner, “Ask me about my micropenis” (available on Etsy).