We live in a lovely, shabby, dilapidated house. But it is home.

It has deep red carpet and well-fingered magnolia walls. There are rooms where, if you take the handle of the door, it will come off in your hand. Many a time, after bath, I have heard a muffled “Mummy, can you open the door please?” from a bemused Felix stuck inside the bathroom.

Often, in the past, I have hatched schemes to replace the carpet with clean-lined mediterranean ceramic tiles, or warm wood: but every attempt has ground to a halt, somewhere in the planning stage.

The ground floor bathroom does not have a conventional drainage system: it uses an electric pump to take waste away, including the large volume of water created by the flush of a toilet.

I have a feeling Lewis Carroll was called in as executive consultant when the plumbers fitted the toilet.

Because the shiny red-and-white switch which controls the electrics is fitted at a diminutive height of one foot above the red carpet.

In addition, it is not in an out-of-the-way location, somewhere in the bathroom, but in the main hall, where tall and short love to amble and take the air.

Short, in particular, have some relevance here.

Big Al came to tea this evening, holding court from his bright green high chair, surveying a table full of good and healthy things and concluding the only thing worth eating was the cake.

His sensible mother delayed the cake while bread, fruit, chicken and cheese, ham and squash were consumed. Finally, he had finished, and he got down from the table.

In the frenetic atmosphere of a Shrewsday Sunday, there is a lot going on. Games were being played, grown ups arranged Christmas present ideas, and no-one noticed Big Al at his favourite spot opposite a switch: is it my imagination, or was it carefully equipped with a label marked : “Flick me”?

After communing with the switch for a little while, and addressing a few short observations in its direction, he thereby turned it off.

Five minutes later Phil shot into the kitchen, looking for the floor detergent. “No-one go into the downstairs toilet”, he advised with considerable urgency. “It’s a bit flooded.”

It is just another of the foibles of our shabby house: if the switch goes off, the next hapless victim to flush the chain experiences surreality: the water rises, and continues to rise, and makes its way out of the toilet bowl and ventures remorselessly across the floor. There are small islands of refuge: the scales; the shower step; but the only way out, once this pungent event has taken place, is to take the mop and deposit the water painstakingly back into the system from whence it came.

Shabby it is, and shabby it shall remain. We would love to make it a bastion of the smart set, but the years stretch ahead with school fees to be paid. We are faced with capping any ambitions for betterment, and trusting that hospitality will always render these four walls comfortable for our friends.

What we need, really, is a flounder.

Why, you ask, would a flat fish which haunts the mud around bridge piles and coral reefs help a middle class English family to rise in the world?

Could it be the wandering eyes?  Tiny larval flounders have them both of one side of their body, but as they grow into youngsters, one of the eyes simply wanders round to the other side. It can’t seem to enjoy it round that side though: because the moment the flounder is adult, it’s back to join its partner on the same side once more.

No, it’s not the eyes: according to a legend, distilled in a nineteenth century poem, one flounder had some exceptional powers.

Once upon a time, wrote German poet John Godfrey Saxe, a fisherman was out at sea.

Things were not good for the fisherman. He was extremely poor, and he lived in a hovel with his wife. One day he caught a flounder in his nets, and cheered: there would be a supper at home today.

Bemusingly, however, the flounder appeared to be able to talk.

“Don’t kill me! Please! Throw me back!”, the flounder pleaded with the fisherman, whose heart sank. There was no way he could ever bring himself to eat a flounder who could talk.

In an equally bewildering development, the fish spun a tale about being a great prince, enchanted and imprisoned within fishy skin. Supper evaporated in a  cloud of intangibility, and the fisherman elected to throw this particular member of the royal family back to lurk in the mud and stare pointedly at everyone down there in the ocean’s depths.

The fisherman arrived home, dejected.

His first mistake was to tell his wife the whole story. Her response at some points reached a screech. “What? You just let him go, and never asked for anything in return?” she demanded of her hapless spouse.

She instructed him firmly: go back, and ask for a decent house instead of the hovel with the mud floor.

He went to have a word with the regal wander-eyed fish. “Flounder, flounder, in the sea, hither quickly come to me; my wife Sybil will have her way, no matter what I do or say…”

Poor, henpecked little man. When he returned home, his wife was in a very nice house, thank you. But of course, the wife was happy with that for about a month before she was malcontent once more. This time she wanted a large, grand mansion, which she was accordingly granted.

The demands became bigger, and more outrageous. First, a palace; then, to become a queen. And each time the flounder acquiesced, because of the debt he owed to the little fisherman.

Of course, she went a step too far. She stepped on the toes of the religious community, and asked to become a second Pope. She was busted right back down to private, living in the hovel where she started.

We have a very nice house in shabby clothes, with a few handles astray and a few fingerprints on the walls. It is true the sofas have seen better days, and the whole place could use a total revamp.

But it’s the old, old moral: advancement did not make the fisherman’s wife happy. It is time to be content with what we have, and stand by our choices. If only the fisherman had been a little stronger about his.

Although: we are thinking about having Lewis Carroll’s switch moved next to the ceiling.