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Pre-loved and Gently Used, by Josephine D. Wong
I never loved the lamp I found in Berlin on December 10th, 2005. But I’ve never once left it behind. The Art Deco lamp, like my fiancé at the time, was functional, sophisticated, and just a bit ugly from certain angles. He saw it first and called out across the shop: “Check this out.” On its hexagonal stained glass shade, orcas drift among oyster, azure, and copper-tinted shapes. It matched nothing we owned. What really caught his eye wasn’t its beauty, but its price. Dangling from a cotton string, a paper tag in lopsided script declared: I love you just enough. It was €135.
We packed it in soft denim and five-dollar pashminas, carrying it back to Aldgate East, where it sat upon a glass side table. Much like me, it was always polished but never once turned on.
When I left, I packed the lamp in a rush of Primark bags and new lingerie, hauling it to Clapham Junction. There, it claimed a spot beside an unplugged 14-inch television, casting subdued doubt upon twelve months of whisky-soaked nights with a rebound lover.
Then the lamp and I moved again, this time to a northwest London walk-up with peach carpets, four roommates, and one bathroom. Later, south to Streatham Hill, past betting shops and chicken take-outs. By then its wiring was glitchy; disassembled, stored, and moved with less care each time. It takes some fussing now before it lights.
A younger boyfriend with tousled hair and a posh accent furnished his flat straight from page 32 of the Ikea catalogue: dark browns, sharp edges. Reliable, well-formed, built for fun. Among the flat-packs, the antique lamp seemed worldly. By the bed it shone—the first and last thing turned on or off each day. The fuse, always aglow.
It stayed this way when we moved to Hackney. By then it was the only glimpse of warmth when we came home at night. Its fittings were loose, hanging on bare threads, missing washers. Seven years had passed, and the greyness of London took its toll. I took it apart, wrapped it carefully in coats, and stored it away for another two.
Eventually I was drawn to Santa Monica, where I walked barefoot to work along the ocean and basked in sun-drenched patios. My furnishings and possessions remained, a home away from home. Finally, when I was expecting my first child, I sent for the lamp. I gave away art, books, hats, and coats, but kept it. I unwrapped it from bubbled plastic, cardboard, and tape.
Now it sits on my desk – too fragile to use, too familiar to ignore. Plugged into American electricity, out of place among cacti and California light. Still, it’s always there. Not because I want it, but because I don’t know what it would mean if it wasn’t.
About the author
Josephine is a Los Angeles-based emerging writer currently working on her debut novel. Over the years, she has crossed oceans, swapped continents and, she says, ‘learned that people everywhere love badly and brilliantly in the same ways’ – as her piece, Pre-loved and Gently Used, illuminates. ‘I loved this story,’ says Indira Varma. ‘It’s really witty, and I thought the personification of that eternally turned-off lamp was brilliant.’
In Glare and Stitch, by Madison Patterson
If fireworks are men’s, all propulsion and fanfare, then this blooming quilt is for the women.
This thing that was once explosively colourful is paled and bleached by the years. When Great-Grandma Holly sewed it, she selected each fabric and she manipulated each patch into little closed buds, dotting the expanse with them. It does not take a fantastic stretch of the imagination to compare the quilt to pyrotechnics: the yo-yos look like both the individual bursts of fire and the designs (sunbursts, weeping willows) themselves, those completed, fleeting constellations. What really are fireworks but man’s attempt to make the stars more ephemeral, to speed up the whole creation scheme?
I think of grandparents in conjunction with these things, a pale-pink quilt and fireworks, very naturally. Holly made the quilt I sit on now for my Grandma Jani’s 16th birthday, and it has passed hands every Sweet 16 since. It is always with me, never out of my mind’s reach. As for fireworks, my grandfather died on the Fourth of July, in their glare and pomp, years ago.
In all fairness to the women of my family, the quilt has seen its fair share of explosive behaviour too. In the years since my own 16th, it has eavesdropped on arguments between bed-lounging sisters, it’s been whisked away on last-minute moves, it’s felt the weight, only lately, of my first love’s sprawl. God only knows what it saw in 1989, in 1965. Perhaps it has welcomed a newborn. Perhaps it has warmed a lap underneath a firework-freckled sky.
The quilt is more staying than a firework. Yet the quilt too has started to come undone, to drop like summer petals some of its tender yo-yos. I collect these and toss them into safe places: a dusty cream teacup, a cardboard box of mementos. It pains me to see my family’s women fall off, torn at seams and unscrunched and decidedly lacking in vibrancy.
Other things give me pain. I have stayed indoors for several recent Independence Days. The fireworks find me regardless. Two of my friends lost their grandmothers this year. I wonder about their proverbial teacups. Are they filled with the decay of a family? Will my friends remember the day of their losses? Will they hate and revere the day’s objects and trivia?
I have lost a grandmother too. Penelope, but known to me as Nana. During Makah Days we’d pack up the station wagon and drive to the reservation on which her indigenous ancestry is centred. The cold night would crawl upon us and we’d cluster teasingly close to the rocks and shore, and nearby men would light fireworks in the salty air. Their embers would come twinkling down, falling almost upon our eyelashes.
Nana is gone but the glittering sea air is not. Nor is the summery liberation of Grandpa Tom’s farewell. And this quilt and its echoes of women’s hands keeps me company, moors me home, even now.
About the author
When she’s not journalling or nursing a martini at Le Monde, emerging writer Madison can be found across the street, pursuing her masters in creative writing at Columbia University. Her piece was an explosive success with the judges, who praised its choice of especially rich objects. ‘The imagery was so vivid,’ says Emily Tobin. ‘Madison’s writing expertly reveals how objects can record time, and reach out a hand from one person to the next.’
This Woman’s Work, by Lewis Chong
Her gaze is still loving all these centuries later. Time’s mucky fingers have smoothed the eyes and whittled a strong Greek nose to a nub, but she smiles on. Quickly shaped from a pinch of terracotta, this tiny bust shouldn’t exist. Temple offerings tend not to stick around. They’re promised to the heavens in ex- change for health or wealth or mercy – the usual things we wish for. Her purpose was to give someone else one last go of it all. But the gods had other plans.
It was the toilet-roll-stockpiling phase of Covid-19 when I discovered her. The pandemic was just another historic event in a long life of historic events. She’s seen Buddhism rise and Genghis Khan fall. Watched the Industrial Revolution change lives and the Black Death steal them. Even fangirled as Apollo 11 reached the moon and Voyager 1 searched the stars. A spectator to all of it. No disaster, uprising or clumsy hand got in the way of this votive offering. That’s the proper term. ‘Votive’ is also fine. I prefer ‘devotional’: it’s got more heart. Plus it sounds like a Motown group: The Three Devotionals. They’d shimmy in Bob Mackie sequins with hair even higher than their vocal range.
I collect because I'm weak. Against my primal urge to clear out, beautiful little knick-knacks gather all around me. My head says 'Reduce! Set it free. Imagine how tidy it'll be,' while my heart falls for every stone fragment and chipped piece of pottery. And like old houses, you don't really own these things, You can't. They exist on a completely different timescale.
You’re a custodian: a pair of protective hands that – alone, are quite unhelpful, honestly – form a human chain from now to antiquity, preserving the best of us. It’s a link to the past in an age of amnesia.
The devotional and I, we’re roommates. That’s how I see it. I call her Maggie for an uncanny resemblance to Maggie Smith’s role as Thetis in Clash of the Titans. It makes sense. She is modelled after a goddess after all. Which one exactly is guess-work. It seems in the distant past someone used Maggie as a kind of worry bead, because the features that could identify which of the pantheon’s deities she embodies have been rubbed away. No doubt she’d be highly specialised in the ancient sense – Althea, the goddess of semi-hard cheese; Photine, keeper of spouts and spigots. Though it’s much more fun not to know. Never meet your idols and all that.
For now, this 2,524-year-old (give or take a century or two) rests above my bed on a metal plinth, as most precious things tend to. Maggie’s always watching but not judging. Never judging. Even as I doomscroll attention-rotting content about longevity on an app that’s far younger than both of us. Maggie knows it’s just a phase. She’s seen this episode before.
About the author
After 15 years as a copywriter, Lewis is used to conjuring space in text – most lately, for John Lewis’s big Christmas campaign. He’s also no stranger to lavishing attention on roommates – be it a ‘lumpy English bulldog with an unusual appetite for broccoli’, or the bust he describes here in zippy prose. ‘Here’s a person who knows how to have fun with language,’ says Emily. ‘So clever and pleasing!’ Indira agrees. ‘It’s hard to be trivial and expansive.’
422 Years To Go, by Henry Cockburn
Do you know how long it takes for a disposable water bottle to decompose?
That’s not rhetorical – I genuinely need to know. The one on my desk is starting to sweat, listing over an electrical socket. I stole it from Ian McKellen, you see.
A book festival in a university town. 2016. I take a week off work to volunteer. If that sounds noble, in truth I am here to suckle well-chosen words, to wean on high language. In exchange for pretending to check tickets, I get to watch from the aisle and flash my lanyard provocatively at the people who normally turn me away.
Here comes Ian McKellen, ancient and sprightly in his long purple scarf and, I assume, other clothes I don’t remember. He does not know it yet, as he passes in an uproar of hangers-on, but he is about to be handed a precious thing: cheap water, fresh from the multipack. Unchilled because we’ve got not fridge. We’ve had complaints.
Now it’s his. Perhaps it caught what I’ve been looking for.
I’d like to tell you that our eyes meet as he tosses the relic to the mob, to me, like the armband of a clammy tennis star; or that, in a moment of wild devotion I tear it from his pursed, parched lips and slip through the window as he intones like Prospero: ‘No – let him go. He’s earned it.’
In truth, when all is done I simply pick it up and nurse it from Oxford to Manchester to Cambridge and East Anglia.
Are these here those tenuous words I took, condensed beneath the splitting cap?
Sir Ian is my friend now, I think. I mean, I have his DNA, which is generally only kept by friends or weirdos. On the other hand, I have never spoken to him and he does not know that I exist. I’ll think on that a while.
I don’t even like Ian McKellen that much. In fact, I hate him. Now I’ll never be rid of this piece of old tat. What if someone asks where it is (they never have) when this story gets passed around the dinner table (it never is)?
I looked it up, by the way, how long a plastic bottle lasts. 450 years.
Bury me with it. And when I’m dug up, put it on view. Make a plaque – I always wanted that. It’s precious, you see. To me.
About the author
‘Henry’s story was great and quirky and I loved it,’ Kim Hastreiter says. ‘Definitely an original thinker!’. Raised in the North, Henry swapped out studying dead languages at Oxford University for the living art of fiction over at Manchester. A former book- seller, he likes characters ‘that squirm and lie – though rarely to themselves’. His McKellen- mad narrator made Emily laugh out loud: ‘It was funny and weird – and so beautifully paced!’
Further reading on The World of Interiors Writing Competition:
- Meet the US winner, Rita LaForce
- Meet the UK winner, Iqbal Hussain
- Discover how Montblanc is inspiring a new generation of writers
- Meet the judges: Emily Tobin, Hamish Bowles, Indira Varma and Kim Hastreiter
- Sign up to The World of Interiors newsletter, and be among the first to know details of any upcoming competitions
A version of this article also appears in the November 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers.
