Southern China travel file: how sofas grew big, fat, and opulent

I was recently pondering whether or not everything is slightly more meaningless these days when my life took a screeching turn for the better.

I was in Kaiping, in Guangdong province, taking my morning walk - a walk that's normally replete with thoughts about how meaningless everything has become - along the waterfront when I saw it. On a notice board, plastered with the phone numbers of scaffold-builders, drivers and whores, was a photo of … possibly a smouldering, seductive bridegroom? But bridegrooms never appear alone in photographs.

It must have been a mainland pop star, all dressed in white, sitting on a piece of furniture so hysterically uber-opulent that the dress in the newest film version of Cinderella would look like a dirty rag next to it.

It had rococo, it had silver and, while remaining majestic, it was also sagging a bit under the raw muscle power of the sexy beast!

Bang, it hit me with an irresistible force. I would start a new thing. Opulent sofa-sitting. In fact, I had posed for quite a few photos on opulent mainland sofas, notably in hotels, for quite some time already, without a conscious understanding of how I was creating a new thing.