This blog is a tribute to a long-serving colleague of mine that I have worked with on-and-off for 16 years and is now entering semi-retirement. Yes, it's my £25 Argos desk. It was bought as a short-term solution but is somehow still in use many moves later. It's not quite as self-indulgent as a 9-part series on my student radio years, but if you like hearing about cheap furniture lasting for a very long time this is for you. It is, objectively, terrible, but through its longevity I’ve somehow become fond of it.
In October 2005, as I relocated to the capital, Kate and I moved into a shared flat in Chalk Farm in north west London. We had a pokey room to call our own and shared the rest of the flat with a rather strange couple. We felt we could do with something to plonk our (still fairly hefty) laptops on so we caught the 168 bus down to Camden High Street, consulted the laminated book of dreams and bought a desk from Argos for the princely sum of £25 - no doubt paying £12.50 each. We chose it literally because it was the cheapest, smallest one available. Even so it came in an enormous box and weighed an absolute ton. Bringing it home on the bus was a very London thing to do. We later did the same thing with a huge CRT TV, praying no one would need the wheelchair space. I don't have many pics from this flat but here it is in the bottom of shot just as we were moving out..
Whilst it is fairly sturdy standing on its own, when you pick it up it feels as if it is about to snap into two. The desk endured its first move the following May when we got our own place in Highgate We moved from the 5th floor of a block of flats to a basement flat, and it survived. Here is yours truly hard at work in the summer of 2006 doing...something.
Our next move was in 2007 to Archway and again the desk survived the move. Here it is with our new tower PC that we'd bought from PC World on Tottenham Court Road and, you guessed it, brought it home on the bus. Silver was really "in" during the noughties wasn't it? Incidentally if you're wondering why we moved so much, this should fill you in.
Next came Crouch End in 2008 and the desk happily fitted in a nice little slot by the window in the bedroom. Quite how it hadn't fallen apart by now from being lifted in and out of vans I'm not sure. Something of a landmark moment occurred in this flat when I worked from home for the first time - initially on call out of office hours then for a full working day during extremely heavy snow in February 2009, when 24 hours' worth of ITV1 was sent to transmission whilst sat at it. Also in Crouch End we got laptops again and the desktop PC was binned, but the desk survived because why not?
The biggest threat to The Desk came when we bought our own place in Crystal Palace in 2014. We now had three bedrooms so it ended up in the "spare" (the third being for general crap, later becoming the nursery). Obviously we wanted to have nicer furniture than the shite that we'd bought 9 years earlier as broke graduates, but we were now broke thirty year-olds having used every penny to our name stumping up the deposit. The desk survived for now, though Kate did add some new drawer handles to give the impression it wasn't a cheap piece of tat. But over time, we realised that there wasn't really much space for anything bigger, and we hardly ever used it so why waste money on something new?
Famous last words. On Friday 13th March 2020 it was confirmed we'd be working from home "for a while", and Desk 2005 became my home for (at least) 37 hours a week. Kate's postgraduate course also switched online so it was home to education as well as work. It is objectively far too small to work at. It is extremely shallow so your eyes are far too close to the monitor. I hate to think how my eyesight has deteriorated sitting at it. A couple of months in we bought a new chair that required some serious research to locate one that actually fitted in the gap underneath, but there was no room for a bigger desk so on it plodded. Here are me and a co-worker a couple of days into the new regime.
So the cheapo desk became something I spent hours and hours every day sat at. Then we had the biggest move of all: we bought a house in Leeds, meaning we could finally have room for a better desk (apparently there were other reasons for the move too). Our tortuous purchase meant we had to move briefly back into with my parents, so the indestructible desk as well as being moved across the country spent a few weeks in storage. So this was the end, right? Wrong. I have spent another two months sat at the ruddy thing. This pic taken from Kate's Instagram demonstrates not only how thin the thing is, but also how life has changed since we bought it...
Eventually the new desk arrived and then I finally found time to actually construct the thing. But last week I finally sat at it for the first time, in my new actually-quite-cool attic office. So it's crunch time for the desk. A candidate for my next trip to the tip? Maybe, except...we don't have much furniture in the spare room yet. So it can stay there for now. It's better than nothing right? If you fancy setting yourself up for the next 16+ years the desk is still available from Argos for (chokes on coffee) £65! It is hilariously now branded as part of the Habitat range, showing if nothing else how meaningless that label is. There is actually still a £25 desk too which looks even sadder than ours.
Thanks Argos. £25 well spent.
JUNE 2023 UPDATE
The desk that cost £25 in 2005 and £65 in 2021 has now risen to an astonishing £90. Even the sad replacement in that price band that I highlighted retails at £45, an 80% price rise in two years.
And the desk itself? It lives on with a new owner...
