What a Mess...?

(Or - Pondering about the past, part 2...)

As a young girl, Marie Condo, the 'Tidying Expert', once fainted because she was trying so hard to get rid of as much of her clutter as she possibly could. I've not yet delved into the tidying majesty she sells, but I do know that kids obsessed with tidying deserve a raised eyebrow.

My dear Uncle, my Godfather, was a self-confessed messy man. He kept loads of stuff, had mountains of paper all over the place, picked up free leaflets everywhere he went, and had numerous notebooks where he tried to make sense of all the detritus he surrounded himself with. Having been charged with sorting out the belongings in his bungalow when he died, I can, hand on heart, say he never, ever made sense of it all.

My Mum, his sister, was made from very different cloth. She wanted to throw away everything. She rarely got her wish, but had she ever rubbed a lamp and been met with an all-powerful genie, he would have been tasked with a throwing away request that would have made Marie Condo collapse in a heap.

A hoarder living alone gets to indulge his hoarding desire whenever the mood takes him. But the anti-hoarder, the matriarch of a ‘five family’, has to force down her desire to have a daily garden bonfire and, instead, bide her time and use guile to achieve her aims.

My Mum developed a genius method of getting rid of the crap we three kids stockpiled.

(My Dad, by the way, is a terrific hoarder – not because he wants to keep stuff but because he can’t bring himself to throw any of it away – which is the exact opposite of the Condo method. I think.)

What Mum did was this: she’d see something – perhaps a burst football or an old jigsaw or maybe even a whole bunch of books on a shelf in one of our bedrooms. Stuff we’d grown out of. Stuff that we were never going to play with or read again unless we regressed into younger children overnight. She would keep an eye on the items and check whether they moved, were used, or in any other way interfered with. I don’t know how long this reconnaissance went on for, but my Mum had the patience of an assassin with a telescopic sight, lying low for hours waiting for her prey to appear in the cross-hairs.

(The first Hollywood sniper/assassin that springs to mind is Gary Busey in Lethal Weapon. That’s not helpful. My Mum was nothing like Gary Busey. She had brown hair for a start.)

Not my Mum...

Once Mum was sure of ‘item inactivity’ she’d remove the thing to a holding place – a cupboard downstairs or a shelf in the garage. And then she’d go back to lying in wait - for her opportunity to pounce.

(Describing her like this now, I’m realising I’m the offspring of a human-sized python. From the North East.)

After as much time as she thought fair, and only if we had not even noticed the disappearance of whatever it was, the items would make their way out of the house, never to be seen again. Occasionally we would notice, but only several years later. But not only was it too late then, but Mum had proved her point: we had a tonne of crap we never looked at.

Until, of course, this ‘foolproof’ method backfired. I had a collection of Shoot magazines, dating back to when I was about 8 or nine.

(For the uninitiated, Shoot was one of the first glossy football magazines. It was also only the second magazine I’d ever had on order from the newsagent, delivered each week by a kid on a bike. The first had been Battle Picture Weekly which showed the allies doing battle with soldiers who shouted ‘Schnell, schnell!’ a lot. Here’s one I had.

My childhood reading. Explains a lot...

In order to make some space in my room I bundled up a huge pile of Shoot magazines and placed them in the garage. Schoolboy (literally) error. Because when you live in a neighbourhood where the scouts used to collect ‘waste paper’ once a month, and those scout leaders asked if one additional bundle of magazines was for them, well, my Mother saw an opportunity and away they went.

It was a mistake she said. And I’m sure it was. But I never let her forget her crime against childhood humanity. How we laughed about it. (Outwardly. I never laughed inside.)

Thinking about it, my brother was pretty organised and things in his room were mostly well-ordered. My younger sister developed an allergy to dust so much of her stuff had to get gone for health reason. This was hard for my sister. My Mum thought all her Christmases had come at once.

Which left me.

I had the biggest room of the three of us. This was not due to any favouritism. The room was the one we, as little kids, all shared. Then my sister needed her own room, being the only girl. Then my brother, as the oldest, needed a place to study and be, well, neat.

Which, still, left me.

My Uncle was actually the messiest person I’d ever met. However, whenever he came to visit, he’d ask to be shown my room, and always leave it smiling, knowing he had quite some way to go to beat me.

On Marie Condo’s website, she lists some items that we might want to hang onto because of their intrinsic importance to us. Specifically, she says shoes, bags and toothbrushes are worthy of our love and of being cherished. (I can feel that eyebrow rising again.) To be fair, she also mentions ‘electronics’ in this category too, which I understand – touch my phone or laptop and I will kill you. Schnell, schnell!!

She speaks of only keeping things that bring joy. But I can’t help thinking she means things like trouser presses and that odd ceramic vase thing you paid a fortune for, which if you bothered to research its origins you’d discover is actually a sort of antique ‘she wee’, which explains why the blooms never last very long in it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the multi-award winning, best-selling author and entry in Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People list is all wrong. Not at all. But if she comes near my stuff, I’m going to un-colour code her sock drawer. You see if I don’t.

The thing is, I don’t think she’d quite understand how many memories are held in so many of the things I own. And how a big box of detritus is not a purgatory to be razed from one’s life, but a time-machine to a hundred places in my past that I have no intention of letting go of. And ‘joy’ doesn’t always come into it.

There’s the big, fat, completely impractical, glasses case covered in owls, that I’ve never used, nor particularly liked. But my youngest gave it to me when he was about six. He’d strong-armed his Nan into buying it for me, which is immaterial - he saw it and thought of me, when I wasn’t there. When I see it, I’m reminded of that six year old thinking about his Dad. The owls stay.

There’s the handful of artificial tea lights that barely glimmer now when you flick the switch underneath, but in the first few months Sarah and I met, they were the lights by which we stayed up talking, the lights by which we fell in love. The fake tealights stay.

There’s the letter I hadn’t ever remembered reading until my Mum was gone. In it she told me about a dream she’d had about me. Marie Condo, wielding a flamethrower couldn’t make be part with that. And it doesn’t bring me joy, it breaks my heart. The letter stays.

There are four, seven foot high bookshelves in our house. Every shelf is crammed to the gills with books. Some I will probably never read. But a glance of a random inside cover tells me I was with my eldest, pushing him in a buggy, when I bought it. And in that instant I remember that day. I remember where we were. I remember the little man who behaved impeccably while I indulged my desire for second hand books. I remember the fruit and veg stall on the corner of the street. I even remember the weather. Move away from the book, Ms. Condo, move the hell away.

But also, every shelf, in front of the books, has stuff on it. The sort of stuff you peer beyond if you’re looking for a particular volume. But if you actually look at the items, they’re all doorways to other places. Places I was heartbroken, places I was in love, places I was proud, places I was lost. Maybe you have stuff like this? If you do (and I sincerely hope you do) I don’t care how much space these things take up, keep them, keep them, keep them!

Because you might remember that day without its trigger, but there’s every chance you won’t. And if you don’t, that day may never again wander through your mind. I think that's sad.

Right now, on my desk, I have a wooden block with three pairs of ever more blunting scissors in it. I don’t remember buying it – it looks like an Ikea-type impulse purchase. I rarely use scissors. Who does? But I remember the block in the last place I lived, and the one before that and the one before that. On all my desks. In my various sightlines. Certainly not a ‘friend’, certainly not ‘joy-bringing’ but definitely part of my story.

I’ve records I’ll never listen to again. Go West, by Go West, for one. Remember them? We Close Our Eyes? Or what about Call Me?

80s album covers were so...80s!

I was 17 when I bought that album. The music no longer strokes the musical hairs on the back of my neck, or in my ears, but it stands there holding open a portal to my past. And it’s not just about the music. As soon as the album came into my head I opened up Spotify. The band ceased to exist a very long time ago. But Spotify gave me a link to the lead singer, Peter Cox. And by some hideous nightmare filter of life he’s now much older than he was when I was 17.

I know, I know, I know, I know, I know.

But I press play on their most famous song and I’m a teenager again. Hey, Condo, no!

Pens. Coasters. Records. Tea towels. Mugs. T-shirts. DVDs. Books. Detritus. And everything else. I’m keeping it all.

It’s not really about the nostalgia. Nostalgia is dust that settles on the things you started to forget last week. Nostalgia is summoning up the corpses of things you didn’t know were dead. Nostalgia is the tinkle of a china cup in an Agatha Cristie-esque tea room, it’s incorrectly remembering a childhood where nothing bad happened and you could cycle the streets with your eyes closed and leave babies in prams outside Safeway stores because badness hadn’t been invented yet. That's nostalgia.

Actually remembering can be a much more challenging pursuit: digging a difficult hole and climbing down inside the things that moved us the most. Not in a morbid way, but in a way that says I will understand this. I will bear witness to this. I will survive this. No matter how many times I have to slap it in the face.

Decluttering in the short term is brilliant. If you have nine spatulas, burn a few by all means. But if your mum bought you three of them when you went to University and you acquired two the first time you had to live alone, and your son made one in woodwork and the other three arrived in your life when you were working on a Disney show, and all three of them feature Disney characters – keep all of them. Why would you not?

Because it’s not about happiness. It’s not even about tidiness. It’s not about organising your stuff so your mum doesn’t siphon it out into the garage. It’s about you, your past, your memories, your foundations, the building blocks of who you are.

If you own a fridge magnet from a place you don’t remember – charity shop it. If you have clothes you don’t like, donate them. But if you have dust-gatherers that take you back to places in your life that feel like two years ago but are actually two decades ago, dust them lightly, then place them somewhere you can find them next time.

The past is the only reason we’re exactly who we are today. We are not a storm that obliterates everything behind us. We are an ever-changing caterpillar, turning one day into a butterfly, the next, a sabre-toothed tiger or maybe an overused wok.

Lives are not always about what comes next. So often our feeling is: I’ve achieved this, now what? When, maybe, all the learning is behind us. A glance over the shoulder never did anyone any harm – and if I’d done that before getting off my bike during my cycling proficiency test, I’d be the only kid to get 100%, ever. (True story.)

You know that song that demands that thing be remembered from all those years ago? We all have them – songs that take us back. But they're not unique in that skill. How about that ashtray and that lighter of your Grandfather’s and the picture you can’t stand from the person who died and the purposeless bowl made by the child of someone you cared for.

Next time you spend so long trying to find something to watch on Netflix that you run out of time to actually watch something on Netflix, glance instead at something you own and remember why it matters, where you bought it, who you were with.

The best stories are not on our TVs. And books about decluttering and filtering out mess, well I’m sure they’re a great pressie for that certain someone, but, well, they’re not for everyone.

NB: but if it's crap, it's crap - don't let your crap become a tyranny! Obviously.

What?

That's what Marie Condo says?

Is it?

Oh. Crap.