"NO WAY!" I shrieked. “Absolutely not!” I had walked into the lounge on Saturday afternoon, while my husband had been clearing out the spare room and my gaze fell on two ugly human-sized speakers, resting against the wall. “There isn’t room for them anywhere else,” my husband patiently explained, “and it will be nice to have music on in here.” We had ended up with these humongous speakers because his best friend had gone off to India “just for a year” and it had been agreed that we would look after them. But since buying a house, I wanted things to look nice and cosy and devoid of eyesores. I communicated this point at a volume that even the gigantic speakers could not compete with and after a heated debate, they were banished to a different room.