We bought a new vacuum cleaner for Karen’s Mum last week, after her trusty cylinder model packed in. There were only two on sale in Morley ASDA, both a quasi-own brand called ONN. In the process of setting it up, we were rather alarmed that it managed to suck rather a lot of muck out of our kitchen carpet, one that had been supposedly deep cleaned & professionally shampooed recently.

Anyway, a week further on, Karen’s mum is not entirely happy with it because it is fairly heavy & hard to push. So we took over our trusty Dyson De Stijl which is an early-ish DC01 model with added HEPA filtration & a freaky colour scheme.

(De Stijl is a Dutch art movement based on simplicity and abstraction).

Consequentially, we gave her our old one and bought the new one off her, working out that it isn’t quite so hard to push when you back off the carpet pile setting, now everyone is happy. (Until she finds out how much the filters are!)

I’d also recommend James’ autobiography, it exposes the vested interests of the grubby Corporate world and is also a good read. I read the first edition and he has subsequently added to it (I caught up with the difference in the library one day, or maybe it was Waterstones…)