At last, my table of contents

Thursday, 30 April 2026

Virginia Fallon is a staff writer and columnist based in Wellington.

OPINION: I have finally bought the table.

Not just any table, but the table – the one I have been looking for, on and off, forever. The table that is, for all intents and purposes, the one I grew up at: a 1960s Formica-topped number with metal accents and absolutely no interest in being fashionable.

My daughter says it’s the ugliest table she has ever seen.

I love it so much I could weep.

It is, objectively, not a typically beautiful table. The top is a determined red, flecked with chips and spots, while the chrome legs are tubular and earnest, ending in practical little floor-protecting caps.

Taken together, the end result does not suggest luxury, promise comfort, or any of the other things modern tables do to make themselves seem less like furniture and more like lifestyle choices.

It is but a table. It knows it is a table and is not here to impress anyone. It is making me giddily, unusually happy.

My nana had a table like this. Not just similar, nor even in the “style of”, but almost exactly the same. Or at least close enough that when I saw this one – slightly scratched, faintly worn, carrying the soft scuffs of a long and useful life – something in me went a bit strange.

I didn’t grow up clocking the table. I never sat there admiring its clean lines or wipe-able surface. It was always just the table: the thing at which we perched, talked, left stuff on, and came back to.

It’s taken me ages to find it. For years now I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time wandering around op shops and garage sales, or scrolling past listing upon listing and thinking, not quite right, not quite right, not quite –

Until it was.

A week before I found this table I gave the old one to my daughter. I’ve been trying to do that for a long time now, singing its praises so fervently that I almost talked myself into keeping it.

But I’ve never much liked that table. In another life we bought it brand new, and the man at the shop said it was an investment – “the sort of table that becomes an heirloom” – which even then we knew was a bit of breathtaking sales-hyperbole.

Though for a quarter of a century, it was table enough. It’s held birthday cakes and had school uniforms ironed on it. It caught spills, absorbed injuries, and was moved from house to house, including a voyage across the strait.

And it outlasted the couch, coffee table and TV cabinet to become the last stubborn remnant of my marriage, the only piece of our furniture that hadn’t been replaced, upgraded, or smashed into a skip bin.

I didn’t want any of that for the table, I just didn’t want to own it any more.

Then last week, it was gone. The old table left my place strapped top-down on the roof of a car, looking for all the world like a dead something – four legs stuck straight up in the air, carted off and away.

Later that day my daughter sent me a photo of the old table in its new home. It looks like it was always meant to be there, I told her, sitting there so very table-y.

In the meantime, my table sits in the kitchen. It holds cups of tea, piles of books, and various cats.

I send her photos of it holding all of those, and she says its still the ugliest table she’s ever seen.

I tell her to give it time.