‘Your home isn’t weird enough.” So says the US interior designer Lily Walters. Her popular Instagram series urges people to make their homes “personal and slightly unhinged”, suggesting what they need is an alligator toilet flush, a decorative stained-glass traffic cone, or a snail-adorned table.
The statement makes me feel as if Walters might not see inside many homes (odd, given her job), because all homes are weird! And not cultivated and curated to add a whimsical touch of eccentricity, but properly weird, verging on disturbing. In the room I’m working in, there’s a feather-filled shrine to various dead hens, two candles in the shape of Saint Lucy’s eyes, a stuffed Australian magpie, a wig, three pewter goats and a French revolutionary cockade made from a jam pot lid (an illustrative selection; there’s much more).
Other people are similarly well stocked with weirdness: my father has a lifesize wooden sheep. One friend sent me a picture of a purloined “3D printed tentacle” he keeps on a shelf; another admitted to possessing “a dead bumblebee in a box on a little cushion”; my son has a homemade poster on the history of the toaster on display.
And that’s the stuff we’re aware of – the real weirdness comes not from decorative choices, but incidental oddities we no longer notice. “No, we don’t have a bathroom door,” for example (I experienced this). “Oh yes, you need to use that chopstick to turn the extractor fan on.” “Watch out for the cat’s special bucket.” “Don’t sit there, it’s where we keep my auntie’s ashes, so she can see the TV.”
Unsurprisingly, Reddit records some choice weirdness spotted in people’s homes: casually repurposed coffins, a pet dog’s amputated leg, a bowl of bear penis bones. When my family moved into our current house, we found a forgotten metal box in the loft that said something like “Radioactive material, do not touch” (it wasn’t).
Anyone who has ever spent five minutes browsing Rightmove knows that insufficient weirdness definitely isn’t the problem with our housing stock. We’re all weird little animals in our weird little burrows, and none of us needs a stained-glass traffic cone to make us weirder.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
