The White Vase That's Worth The Argument

There’s a white vase in this office which has contained real flowers exactly eleven days in its entire life, maybe. We fought about whether that was scandalous or exactly the point of it. Half the office believes you should never be able to see the bottom of a vase; it’s an objet d’art that thinks it’s a specimen jar. The others think its empty cousin does far more useful work every day sitting quietly on the shelf preventing everything else look like it’s been dipped in charging cables and takeaway menus, and flowers are just an optional extra that it can hold when someone feels like it.

We purchased three, off the shelf, before we compromised on one. The first stood too tall on the shelf and spent its whole life getting blinded by a lamp and being spiteful. The second was incredibly thin-necked and anything but a bunch of three didn’t look vaguely hopeful in it, like it was in for a long interview.

The third – the successful one – is roomy enough that if you stuff a bunch of cheap garage forecourt tulips in while they’re still wet from the petrol station it actually looks intentional.

One of our writers waters their bog-standard supermarket flowers like it’s a religion and gets ten glorious days of bloom out of them every time.

Another can leave them until the water’s turned the colour of pond slime that you apologise to the vase for before pitching it.

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They own the same vase.

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This is either evidence that the vase makes no difference at all or evidence that it’s more important than the flowers you put in it; we haven’t decided which.

What we will say, that’s not a sales pitch, is that a white vase should earn its keep when there’s nothing in it as much as it does when there is.

It’s not decorative, exactly, but it’s full stop on a shelf; it’s something that turns the postcards and dead succulent and empty Guinness boxes that live around it into a “curated” look, rather than litter. That’s quite a lot to ask when it came in a box about the size of a shoebox and cost about half of what we spent on the tulips.

Half of us thinks buying it “for flowers” was slightly aspirational anyway, like buying a gravy boat and only using it twice a year and feeling smug about it all. The other half fill theirs with fresh flowers without fail every Monday like it’s on their Outlook calendar. And they’ll look at you funny if you say it’s fine to skip weeks.

We’re not going to lie and say we’ve found a side to rooting for, because we haven’t.

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Years on, it’s still exactly as formed up as it was that first day we went to IKEA. But here’s what we do know: ours has been through two houses, a cat who thought it belonged to him, and about four months last year where it didn’t contain anything other than a single stem of eucalyptus somebody was too sentimental to throw away. It looked good all times; Good enough to know that it didn’t matter what was in it. Whether or not it still looks like it belongs on your shelf when there’s nothing in it, that’s the test.