7 Reasons To Do Away With Curtains

Posted on April 23, 2010 in Posts | 4 comments

1.  Full Disclosure. All manner of weird and shameful things happen behind curtains:  Line dancing; Nazism; geriatric transvestism; the viewing of ITV; this.  All of those things are probably occurring on your street right now.  If we did away with curtains we’d be forced to behave ourselves, which would be no bad thing.

2.  Changing Rooms. Curtains in the changing rooms of clothes shops are a bad idea.  It’s an oft quoted statistic that every year four people die in the UK while putting their trousers on.  I haven’t died while dressing, but I’ve had a couple of trouser-hopping incidents myself – at home, fortunately.  If this hasn’t happened to you, here’s how it works:  You’re putting your trousers on, usually you’ve got one leg in, they’re at ankle height and you’re about to put your second leg in when you overbalance and start to fall sideways.  Once you start falling sideways with one leg in your trousers, self preservation kicks-in and you instinctively hop in the direction that you are falling, to arrest your fall.  But you are so overbalanced – and instinct keeps you hopping – that the only thing that will stop your sideways progress is a solid object (there’s no chance that you can stop by yourself).  But curtains are not solid.  This means that if a trouser-hopping incident occurred in a changing room, you might find yourself hopping right out of it.  Who knows where you could end up?  The changing room opposite?  The men’s jeans section?  Boots?  Wherever you ended up, you’d probably feel a bit foolish.  Perhaps people would point.

3.  It’s Curtains. In films, you often hear the phrase “It’s curtains for you”.  This is bad.   Curtains = Death.  Death = Bad ∴ Bad = Curtains*.

4.  The World. In the opening monologue of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Jaques declares that, “All the world’s a stage…”.  If this is true, then according to the Home Office Manual of Safety Requirements in Theatres and Other Places of Public Entertainment (1934), all the world requires a curtain.  An enormous curtain would block out the sun and would be prohibitively expensive.  Not to mention difficult to wash.

5.  The Kitchen. I don’t understand why people have curtains in their kitchens.  They appear to be utterly without purpose, like the frosted glass windows in aeroplane toilets or the bins in Scarborough.  I wonder if there’s something I’m missing.  It’s the wrong room for sex.  Are people being more secretive about family recipes than I am?  What are they doing in there?**

6.  Venetian Blinds. There’s a better technology available for obscuring windows; Venetian blinds.  They’re more technologically advanced.  They don’t require washing.  They block out the light more effectively.  Okay, so you can get your head stuck in them but, minor indignities aside, they’re so much better than curtains.

7.  The Dream. I used to have a recurring dream when I lived in a shared house.  In the dream I would walk downstairs in the morning and open the dining room curtains (the dining room overlooked the enclosed back garden).  When I opened the curtains I would see, standing there motionless, staring straight back at me, Pierluigi Collina.  Then I would wake up, usually in a cold sweat.  I haven’t lived in a house with curtains since.  It looked pretty much like this, in case you were wondering.

*Maths = A doddle.

** Do you have kitchen curtains?  Do you get up to stuff behind them?  Please let us know what you do via the comments section (anonymously if necessary).