The star of our setting this month is the exquisite ebonised French Empire daybed adorned with elegant black swans. This was an unexpected and exciting find and is truly an object of beauty. The daybed is presented in it’s deconstructed glory ready to re upholster in the fabric of your choice.
One of the greatest certainties in life is that it is sure to be uncertain and black swans are curiously used as a metaphor to describe the improbable happenings that blight our existential security.
Until the seventeenth century historical records described only white swans and it was therefore assumed that only white swans existed. Then in 1697 a Dutch explorer discovered black swans in Western Australia - a discovery which abruptly disproved centuries of assumption and illustrated the possibility of any accepted fact being over turned by an unexpected event or revelation. The Black Swan Theory was coined to describe these rare occasions - events that lie outside of our regular expectations and can change our understanding of prior reality.
The Black Swan Theory is often talked about in relation to financial markets to describe the unforeseen and often random influences that can affect the rise or fall of stock values and make reliable algorithms or predictions an impossibility.
Locally our significant Black Swan would be the Christchurch earthquakes. These surprising and shocking events permanently altered our perception of quotidian reality. They irrevocably changed our world and our expectations of how our lives will unfold.
We experience many mundane Black Swans - a winter of lingering illness that destroys our best laid plans, the deviously hidden rental car drop off point at Rome airport that causes us to miss our flight, the unreliable iPhone alarm clock ( user’s fault I am sure ) that has precipitated many challenging mornings … in fact most days seldom go to plan.
It is quite a skill this human ability to accommodate inconstancy. There is something admirable in our willingness to adapt to change and our acceptance of the unpredictable nature of our lives. Somewhere in the midst of the horror of uncertainty lies a very particular beauty -  it is the vulnerability and fragility of life that seems somehow to make it so precious.
Black swans are such a beguiling metaphor for the capricious nature of existence and a delightful decorative motif for an extraordinary daybed.