I am still trying to be Marie Kondo.
That is to say, I am trying in spirit only, because when I looked at her website she seems to do all her tidying up dressed in a pristine white dressing gown whilst serenely carrying a lighted candle in front of her. If I did that I would have candle wax all over my dressing gown in no time at all and in any case I wouldn’t have a white dressing gown because of coffee stains and dog paw prints. If I did have one I wouldn’t wear it for tidying up, imagine if somebody called round and thought you just hadn’t bothered to get dressed. It would just be too complicated to explain that it was your special Tidying Up Costume.
In any case I had to get dressed because of emptying the dogs and taking the taxi into Kendal for the man at the electrical garage to look at it. You do not do that sort of thing in your dressing gown, certainly not if you want people to think that you are nearly middle class.
The point of being Marie Kondo is to make the clearing out of all of the camper van clutter go with a bit more of a swing. According to her website if you look at something and it does not give you a little thrill of joy, then you should throw it away.
If I followed that principle I would have a very empty house indeed, not least because the first things to go would be the wretched dogs, one of whom had been sick on the floor when I got up this morning. I think the resulting emotion could accurately be described as the exact inverse of a thrill of joy, and led to the dogs being unceremoniously booted out into the yard whilst I cleaned it up.
Still, I thought that I should give it a go, and approached the still-teetering stack of camper van clutter with a determination to dispose of anything joyless.
In fact this led to an awful lot of puzzled frowning.
I discussed my dilemmas with Mark on the telephone last night. He is more ruthless than I am, at least when it comes to household things. He is not at all ruthless when it comes to six foot lengths of rusty box-section steel. In the end he decided that we should keep the frying pan, but that the cutlery should be hoofed out because of it being twenty years old with plastic handles and purchased in a French supermarket, none of which made it likely to add glamour to our new Orient Express ambiance.
I agreed but it was not an easy disposal, I can tell you. I did not exactly feel a thrill of joy but I remembered that we have had many happy moments eating muesli with the spoons and spreading butter with the knives. After that I remembered that several of the forks have got bent tines, which are really irritating when you are eating, so my resolve hardened, and I put them in the dustbin.
I must have been doing very well, because I filled the dustbin, which is a bit tiresome because the bin men won’t be coming until next Thursday, I will have to use next door’s until then.
I threw away all sorts of rubbish
I do not think we are going to need the quilts, which are ancient and made of the horrible fibre stuff instead of proper goose down, but I have saved them anyway, in case we decide to use them as insulation or to make padding for furniture. I do not know what to do with the children’s dressing gowns, or with the raincoat that has been mended with gaffer tape but still keeps the rain off, or with the wine glasses that we might replace with some nicer ones. There are so many difficult decisions to be made.
It is jolly difficult being Marie Kondo, even in dungarees.
I was not sorry when it was time to go to work.
