Stuff and Nonsense

Stuff and Nonsense
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 20, 2015

I rang the shiny doorbell and waited. The doormat said ‘hello.’ I studied the flowery cursive etched into the coir matting. Cute idea, I mused.

Despite the blustery day, the porch was pristine. I cast around for a mound of discarded school shoes. Where were my young son’s feculent socks, peeled from sweaty feet and flung to the ground in the rush to play?

The door swung open and a glamorous school-mum ushered me inside.

“The boys are having a ball,” she said. Half a dozen small, excited voices echoed from somewhere upstairs.

The house was a gleaming study in polished stone. Credenzas and tables were clutter-free. The kitchen bench was a naked slab of white marble. A bank of glass doors were pellucid and fingerprint-less. I spotted the missing shoes on a metal rack, each paired neatly with a slug of matching sock.

“How can you be this tidy with three children?” I sighed. I hoped she’d mollify me by flinging open a cupboard to reveal a welter of lidless Tupperware.

“I hate clutter,” she replied instead. “It makes me feel tense.”

I nodded sympathetically, praying she never arrives at my place unannounced.

Back home, with my kids in the bath, I began folding a pyramid of washing and surveyed the accumulated clutter of five lives. If cleanliness is next to godliness, my living room is a portal to perdition.

There’s my husband’s thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, hogging one end of our dining table, untouched for a month. I’m tempted to get out the vacuum cleaner and finish the job for him.

At the other end of the table, teenaged son reigns over his electronic kingdom. He’s suckered to his laptop via headphones, the contents of his schoolbag scattered under his chair. A spaghetti junction of life-sustaining computer cables and chargers renders the rest of the table useless.

I swivel to take in the TV room and contemplate our bookcase packed with spines: all that reading, waiting for me. My recipe books are crammed into every space. One shelf hosts a still life of encrusted chemist’s bottles, exhumed by the bobcat when we dug the pool. I won’t part with my amber jewels: they know the secrets of our century-old house.

A nook beside the kitchen holds three delicate bowls made by an old potter in Provence. On the smallest bowl he’d painted a little girl on a swing. We agreed it was a fine likeness of my daughter. I’d carried those bowls, as precious as Faberge Eggs, through three airports.

So why all this talk about minimalism? Will de-cluttering my home make me calm and controlled? I doubt it. I tried spring cleaning once. It only proved I’m a hoarder the rest of the year.

I already feel besieged by my 21st century life; the pressure to be constantly available. Some days I feel swamped by the constant emails demanding replies, the texts and phone messages needing acknowledgement, the wads of bills and paperwork calling my name.

Perhaps our clutter has gained a life of its own. Somewhere between the 60s and the 90s, desire became need. Shopping became a competitive sport. I blame China. Who else could mass-produce the gorgeous coffee cups I just bought from Freedom for $2.95 each.

“Did we need more coffee cups?” asked my husband, whose idea of need is different to my own.

I didn’t have all this stuff when I was young. In my twenties, I had one black vinyl sofa, a motley assortment of crockery bought from a garage sale and a futon that hurt my back. When my girlfriend and I moved house, we called in a mate with a taxi truck. Piled up in the van, our stuff occupied so little space, we could have set up house right there on the tray.

For the 25 years since, I have collected, displayed, stockpiled. I’d like to offload the Romertopf clay roaster I was given for my 21st but it seems ungrateful. Instead, it idles in a dark cupboard with my grandmother’s pressure cooker, a blackened jaffle iron and a Moroccan tagine.

I have no idea what’s in my wardrobe, but it’s bursting. I own clothing from size 8 to 14. It doesn’t matter whether I’m in a skinny stage, a heavily pregnant stage or a Toblerone stage, I’m know I’m covered.

The man of the house, however, doesn’t need stuff. He could be happy with nothing more than a ten-year-old ute, a comfortable sofa, a squishy pillow, a newspaper, a remote control, his ugg boots and a barbecue.

Me? I like to arrange my clutter in expensive baskets so it looks more attractive. I know that every time I have a clean-out, I end up re-creating what I already had. I suspect the joy of ditching all that stuff is just as illusory as the joy of acquiring it in the first place.

Minimalist? I’m a maximalist.