Thanks very much for posting the link to "The Tyranny of the Heirloom". I feel better now about my fancy inlaid tilt-top table, a piece of 18th-century English elegance sitting uneasily in the lounge of our 1970s Canadian suburban house.

It was the star of my great-grandmother's parlour, tricked out with lace, silver and delicacies for her weekly Thursday afternoon "at home". When my grandfather was little, circa 1887, he was allowed to sit at that table to polish off the delicacies when the last guests had departed. It is made of mahogany with a tripod base and a top inlaid with pearwood to form a picture of a basket of roses surrounded by a wreath of laurel. With a diameter of 40 inches and standing just a little lower than a standard dining table, it is not suitable for routine use as an eating-off table, but it is great for parties where people help themselves to nice portable snacks set out on plates. But 21st-century people don't have the discipline of their great-grandparents and don't know how to behave in the presence of fine furniture, so I must either protect it with padding and a liquid-repellent cover or cringe whenever a guest (especially a child) approaches it with a glass in his/her hand.

I inherited it in 1992, when my father died, and for 25 years I have arranged the sitting room furniture around it. My father believed that it is valuable, but I know very well that furniture -- even genuine Chippendale -- is worth exactly what one can persuade a customer to pay for it, and Canadians aren't eager to buy furniture they have to be careful with. There are days when I feel stuck with it. And then somebody new will come to the house and say, Wow, what a beautiful thing! So I guess if I'm going to be stuck with something, I shall be grateful that it's not only occasionally useful (with padding and an oilcloth cover) but also beautiful all the time. If I part with it, even for a towering price, I must also part with the ghost of a little blond boy in an Eton jacket scoffing shortbread off a Limoges tea plate, and I just can't do that.