Inspiration

What a brilliant day!

We spent the morning and early afternoon working on the creation of our own Windermere version of the bit of Fifty Shades Of Grey which really appealed to me very much when we saw it.

Regular readers might remember that what really took my fancy and has remained with me as an enduring fantasy was the rascally Christian Grey’s wardrobe arrangement.

If you have seen the film you will doubtless remember that he has the most marvellous space for storing all his clothes. He has a long rail along the whole side of one room, and his clothes are hung with a generous gap between each hanger, so that his pristine shirts and beautiful bespoke suits stay forever neat and uncrushed and fresh. His ties are rolled individually and stored separately in a drawer designed for that very purpose, and all in all it is the most magnificent arrangement and was by far and away the best and most inspiring bit about the whole film.

I don’t suppose we are the only people who came out of Fifty Shades of Grey deciding that they might like to copy some bits of it at home, and our wardrobe has long been a source of unhappiness. It is a very nice wardrobe, inherited from my grandmother, solid and heavy, and impossible to move, and we both like it very much.

However it is a bit narrow for most modern coat hangers, and to make matters worse we had filled it so very full to bursting that everything was squashed together so that no matter how nicely ironed anything was when it went in, by the time it came out it had metamorphosised into a crumpled ruin that one might have stolen from a passing tramp.

The demand for space has been so desperate that we had filled the wardrobe in the loft as well, which we had used for dumping suits and dinner jackets and winter overcoats, and it was so full that you could hardly shut the door.

I am one of the scruffiest people I think I have ever met, but nevertheless when we get dressed up, which we have got to do sometimes, I like my clothes, and Mark’s, to be immaculate. I  try to dry them outside where I can, and iron them and scent everything with with lavender water, and clean our shoes as soon as we have worn them: and the wardrobe difficulty has long been a tiresome nuisance, so today we decided to spend the morning taking the matter in hand.

We would, we decided, make our lives more like Fifty Shades of Grey.

We got everything out and looked at it and threw away a shirt that was looking shabby and sent another one to Oxfam, and checked everything for spots or marks and sponged one off Mark’s waistcoat and discovered on the Internet that the best way to get the tea stain out of my cream jacket was to dissolve a dishwasher tablet and use that, which we did and which worked magnificently, by the way.

Then we went to the dry cleaner’s and bought lots of wire coat hangers because they are narrow enough to fit in the wardrobe, and to the ironmonger’s for some lengths of foam pipe lagging and some tape, and Mark cut pieces off the pipe lagging and stuck them on the shoulders of the coat hangers to stop the awful misshapenness that you get in soft jerseys and things if they are left on coat hangers for too long, and rolled some cardboard round the horizontal wire at the bottom so that trousers wouldn’t get creased, and we put everything on the new hangers.

We took lots of things up to the loft and emptied the wardrobe up there as well. Then we hung shirts and suits on a rail under the eaves, and thought it looked just like Fifty Shades of Grey probably would have if it had been set in a slightly dilapidated mid terrace in the Lake District instead of a glass and steel penthouse in New York.

We spaced them nicely so that they wouldn’t crease, and covered them with a cloth so that they wouldn’t get dusty or fade in the sunlight or get pooed on by spiders which you might not think is a problem but I can promise you that it is, although of course it didn’t matter about the suits which are in bags.

I put away his suit trousers that I had finally remembered to collect from the dry cleaner in Kendal after my interview, and felt pleased because it was a very organised grown up thing to have done. Then we hung my dresses on new coat hangers in plastic wrappers to keep them clean, and our overcoats in their big bags, and put them all in the loft wardrobe.

Everything that was left went in our wardrobe downstairs, tidily spaced and smelling of lavender and beautiful. I don’t mind telling you that I was very happy indeed and could not imagine at all why the girl in the film did not want to stick with Christian Grey because I think that it is an absolute joy to have a wardrobe like that and she must have been quite mad to want to leave it behind.

So I am happy to tell you that the film of Fifty Shades of Grey has given us a new lease of life. We have had the most splendid morning together and have been inspired and thrilled, and by the time we had to get ready for work we were very satisfied indeed.

i can wholeheartedly recommend it