The Session Musician of the Side Table

Every house has one room where the grief goes. It is rarely the room you’d expect. Not the bedroom, not the study with its shelf of unread philosophy, but the lounge, where the good speakers live and where, somewhere on a side table between the remote and a coaster nobody uses, sits a small cardboard cube with a soft white flag poking out of its roof.

Nobody chooses a tissue box. You inherit one from the supermarket the way you inherit a weather system. It arrives in a pattern you would never hang on a wall — faux watercolour, inexplicable paisley, a meadow no meadow has ever resembled — and within a week it has vanished into the furniture.

This is its genius. The tissue box is the session musician of household objects: indispensable, uncredited, and never once asked to take a solo.

It did not begin life as an instrument of sorrow. In the 1920s the tissue was sold to remove cold cream, a vanity item that hadn’t yet found its calling. Then customers started writing in. They were blowing their noses with it. The manufacturer, to its credit, listened to the audience rather than the marketing department, which is more than can be said for most record labels.