The point of a rocking chair

One of those eureka moments when you suddenly realise that you've been looking at something in precisely the wrong way for the whole of your life.

I can dimly remember that when I was small one of my elderly relatives had a rocking chair, a basic thing with wooden rockers and wooden arms, and an upholstered seat and back. Naturally, as soon as I arrived I used to run to the chair, sit down and start rocking for dear life.

Two things puzzled me then. One was that a rocking chair was clearly meant for strenuous activity, and I didn't associate Auntie Nellie or Grandma with that. The other was that when they sat in the chair they didn't use it the way I thought they should — that is, they didn't rock! They just sat there, patiently knitting and talking to my mother, clearly wasting the marvellous opportunity offered by the chair. They were, I concluded, "spoiled rotten" (a phrase that I heard often in the conversations they were having with my mother) by the sheer availability of the chair.

Nowadays as I get older and am rather on the — to put it delicately, and you better had — heavy side I can find getting up from the (ludicrously) low furniture that people have today rather difficult. At my heaviest I had to slide forward in the seat, rest a hand on the arm of the settee (and God forbid that the settee didn't even have arms), and pushing myself forward with the hand, roll on to my feet and immediately try to stand up from the resulting semi-crouching position before I rolled too far and tumbled forwards, with the option of pivoting sideways and letting my weight rest temporarily on the arm in contact with the settee if something did in fact go wrong.

There. Have you guessed yet? I tried to hide it with the use of the word "roll", but you could as easily have used the word "rock" there, and of course I'd simply rediscovered the natural principle of rotating forwards to more easily power upwards, only with everything taken to absurd lengths to cope with my weight.

The rocking chair is the old-tech (and completely ingenious) solution to the common problem of decreased mobility with age. They tended to be rather high affairs, which is a good thing for older people (perhaps I should parse today's taste for low-slung living-room furniture according to signalling theory, and conclude that it's driven by our society's obsession with youth), and when you need to get up you can gently push yourself slightly forward in the seat, which will have the effect of making it rotate forward a little without you having to actually force a rocking motion out of it, and then as you lean forward to stand up it will rotate forward slightly more, delivering you hopefully reasonably safely to your feet.

The technique is similar for sitting down. Here you need to be careful when positioning your hands so that you can press them downward to take your weight without initiating a violent movement of the chair either forwards or backwards. Care is also necessary with the initial aim of your behind: don't land either so far forward in the seat that the chair rocks forwards as you sit, potentially depositing you in a heap on the floor, or so far back that you fall backwards into the chair and then continue to roll, causing a nasty jar to the lower back (and conceivably, if you were very heavy, even rolling the centre of gravity beyond the rear end of the rockers and breaking your neck, though I'm not sure how possible that really is). Then, when you're down and still, you can gently shuffle backwards in the chair until you're peachy.

After a little bit of practice you do get used to sitting down in and getting up from a rocking chair, you just need to pay attention when you do it.

And so granny was right. The point of a rocking chair is to sit, quietly and safely, enjoying whatever it is you are doing, and to rock precisely twice per sitting: once when you sit down, and once again when you get up.