Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista

There’s no one around, the building’s deserted.’
    He was right, but this was the part of the plan that was making me most nervous. Jake had arranged for a friend of his to bring a van round so that we could get rid of all the old furniture and pull up the carpets before the new stuff arrived the following day. To anyone who saw us doing this, under cover of darkness on a Friday evening, it might well look as though we were just stealing. Technically, I supposed, we were actually stealing, since we were removing company property from the premises without permission. Jake’s friend, Stan, was going to take the furniture and store it in his garage, so it could be returned should Rupert and Olly veto the whole plan, so it wasn’t really theft as such. It wasn’t as though we were going to sell the stuff. Still, the whole thing was making me very jittery.
    I took all the papers out of the nasty metal filing cabinets while Jude set about moving the rest of the stuff into the corridor and Jake began the laborious task of carting it down three flights of stairs.
    ‘Bet this isn’t the second date you had in mind,’ I said to him.
    ‘Not exactly, no,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Perhaps next time we could do something just the two of us? Maybe something that doesn’t involve back-breaking manual labour?’
    Fortunately Stan showed up a bit early and was able to give us a hand. By nine o’clock we’d cleared the place, and no one had so much as given us a sideways glance.
    ‘You’ve just got to act like you’re authorised to do whatever you’re doing,’ Jake assured me. ‘Trust me, I spend my life barging into places I’m not supposed to be in order to get a picture. If you just act like you own the place no one will ask you any questions.’
    We stayed in the office until eleven thirty, pulling up carpets and taking down blinds. The parquet tiling underneath was actually in pretty good shape. All it would need was a buff and a polish and it would look pretty good.
    ‘The walls are kind of bare, though,’ Jude commented. ‘It would be good to have some nice art up there.’
    ‘Yeah, but nice art you really can’t buy on the cheap,’ I said, ‘and I’m not putting up crappy posters. We’ll just have to deal with the basics this weekend.’
    The following morning, Jude and I got up early to go into the office. We had to stop off at Gabriella’s on the way to borrow her special floor buffer – apparently an essential household item when you have dogs and children – and at Sainsbury’s to stock up on cleaningproducts. By the time we got to Borough, Jake was already sitting on the steps outside drinking a coffee. At his side were three large canvases.
    ‘Thought you might like to borrow these,’ he said, turning one of them around. It was a photograph of a vineyard at dawn, the mist just rising off the vines. It was beautiful. ‘I took some shots when I was on holiday in the South of France last year. They’re a bit postcard-esque, but they’re not bad. I got them printed up onto canvas a while back. I was thinking of selling them. What do you think?’
    ‘They’re gorgeous,’ I said to him, carefully turning the other canvases around. One was taken in late afternoon, with the sun turning the leaves a reddish-gold, the other was a shot of a chateau and the vineyards surrounding it. ‘Probably not one of our chateaux, but frankly, who cares? They’re stunning.’
    By the end of the weekend the place was transformed. The floors were polished to a shine, the new blinds were hung and behind them were windows you could actually see through. The new furniture, while hardly top quality, all matched, which gave the place a feel of professional uniformity. And Jake’s photographs were absolutely perfect. We hung one in the meeting room and one in Rupert’s office, but the largest was reserved for the wall opposite the main entrance: it was the first thing that you saw when you came into the room and it set the perfect tone.
    For a few moments after we’d finished, we all just stood there, admiring our handiwork.
    ‘It’s like a completely new place,’ Jude said. ‘They have to like it. They just have to. If they don’t, they’ve got no bloody taste and no sense either.’
    ‘Too right,’ Jake agreed, slipping his hand into mine. Not for the first time the contrast between Dan and Jake was thrown into sharp focus – the idea of Dan giving up a weekend to help me redecorate my