It’s Monday morning – or rather, a Monday-morning-feeling construction of time and space in which reality loses its edge – and in the middle of this grey no-man’s-land of silence, half-full coffee cups and crumpled to-do lists, there it is: the second-hand high chair, type ‘children 1-3 years’, an instrument of educational hope, domestic disorder and the tough remains of applesauce. Not new, never was, and yet ineradicable, it stands like a wooden relic of crumbly mornings and miniature tantrums, its seat still soaked with the residue of countless breakfast cereals that, despite many scrubs, have come to form a kind of archaeological sediment. Its backrest tilts backwards unnaturally, not out of mechanical inability, but because it has too often served as a launching pad for toddlers who suddenly decide that sitting still is an ideological prison.