Chairs

P. J. O'Rourke was looking at a folding chair and he read a tag on it which said: "do not attempt to lift the front end of the chair while sitting down on it". He thought that this spelled out what was wrong with America but I won't go into that because (a) I didn't really follow it and (b) I know what's wrong with America already and it's not what O'Rourke thinks. I'm more interested in Chairs. Folding chairs can be a menace; I once as a child caught a finger in one that collapsed under me and I can feel the pain now. Maybe they're safer now than then but I am not one to test that out - I never now sit in deck-chairs.
The topic of chairs came up today when my wife and I were dining in a very good restaurant in Cardiff called "The Brasserie". She remarked on how comfortable the chairs were: soft, seemed to fit cosily into the curves of your back, upright so that you could get close to the table and so on. How many times have I suffered with restaurant chairs, with hard seats and knobbly backs with bits sticking into my spine. Chapter Arts Centre is a case in point of a chairs perhaps satisfying an artistic idea of what a seat should be to look at while being almost impossibnle to sit on.
The test of a chair is how it feels when you sit on it not how it looks. Van Goch's yellow chair looks good I suppose but it also looks most uncomforetable.