Junk? No, it’s my life

Living amid chaos is not good for your state of mind. Make the effort to sort the clutter out and reap the benefits.

Living amid chaos is not good for your state of mind. Make the effort to sort the clutter out and reap the benefits.

Published Apr 23, 2011

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However many facelifts you have had or however many invigorating doses of HRT, your 70th year is a formidable frontier to reach and a time when you are forced to re-evaluate many things. Some emotional, some practical – some both.

Like many women of my age, my family has grown up and moved away and my beloved husband is dead. As painful as it is for me to accept, my house is far too big for one person. It’s time to downsize.

It sounds so simple, but in the past couple of weeks, I have discovered that downsizing is, in fact, hideously difficult, like struggling into a smaller dress size or forcing your feet into a tiny glass slipper. When the Ugly Sisters tried it, they had to cut off their toes. I am reaching that stage.

I know how crucial it is to declutter, thanks to my mother. She taught me many useful things while she was alive: how to fry an egg (slowly); when to wear black at a wedding (never). But after she died in 2005, I learned the most cruel lesson of all: there is no point in hanging on to your treasures.

When mom died, suddenly, overnight, her treasures turned into bric-a-brac. The crystal she had collected, the paintings she loved, were transformed to jumble, the sort of stuff you walk past at a car boot sale.

The man who came to clear her flat didn’t mince his words. He looked contemptuously at the little wooden table she had discovered with so much pride in a local antique shop and said: “That will cost you more to restore than it’s worth.”

But I remembered how she had treasured it, so I kept it. For the past six years it has lived in my bedroom, and every time I look at it, I see mom in my mind’s eye, stroking the flower pattern inlayed top.

But now I’m moving on from a rambling family house to a little-old-lady, two-bedroom flat. And mom’s favourite table will have to go. As will so many treasured items.

It’s been a slow, agonising decision to leave the home in North London where my children grew up. Now they’ve left home, each room is a store-house of memories.

Our beloved black labrador Arthur slept next to that radiator. My late husband, Desmond, perfected his roast lamb and onion sauce at that stove. Every spring the wisteria burst into bloom like a fanfare and that corner of the room was fragrant with its perfume.

Enough! No more sentimental nostalgia. Pull yourself together, I tell myself. Move on.

All the same, I know I would still be clinging like a hermit crab to my familiar shell if a lovely family hadn’t visited and fallen in love with my house, just as Desmond and I did 23 years ago.

They have three children, too, and they are thinking of getting a dog, which will, no doubt, snuggle up to Arthur’s radiator.

I cannot deprive a family of the happiness we enjoyed for all those years. My conscience won’t let me, with my children”s bedrooms empty and unused at the top of the house.

This is not the first time I’ve moved home, of course. But every previous upheaval has been to up-size. The family needed a new home because the children had grown bigger and we needed more space.

And by some strange metaphysical law of clutter, no matter how much larger the new house was than the old one, when we moved, our possessions filled every inch of space.

Now, having been in my current house for more than 20 years, not only is every nook and cranny crammed with stuff, there are no-go areas. I haven’t dared look inside our garden shed for years.

A lot of that stuff won’t be missed. But an awful lot will – at least, by me.

So for the past week, I have been wandering around the house, before becoming temporarily paralysed by memories. Each time I pick up a knick-knack, an unused vase, an ancient photograph and steel myself to put it into my box for Oxfam, my hand falters at the last moment. Because, as the song says, “These foolish things remind me of you.”

They are links with friends, family, and with moments in my life that meant a great deal to me. Chucking them away feels like throwing away a part of me.

My cupboards are bulging with my old clothes, some of them 20 years old (I used to tell myself that if I kept them long enough, they would surely be fashionable again some day). But now I’m 70, I have to face the fact that even if my old red leather trousers do become the new trend – if, say, Kate Middleton is seen around Chelsea in them – my legs are not Kate’s.

Time to grow up, to recognise I am simply too old to wear all the stuff I’ve been hoarding. Time for a trip to the charity shop.

But even the most tolerant and compassionate charity won’t want it all. For instance, I have kept my son Joshua’s bedroom like a place of pilgrimage.

He’s in his final year as a medical student, his life split between shattering every bone in his body on the rugby pitch and patching up patients in Plymouth hospital.

Why do I still keep his shelves filled with the karate trophies he won aged seven? What use are the piles of records he collected when his ambition was to be a DJ?

I screw up my courage to get rid of it all, but his room is so exactly as it was when he lived here that when I go up there (as I still do), I just sit on his bed feeling achingly empty.

My elder daughter Em is away at university. She comes back at weekends, so I kid myself there’s a reason for me to keep the huge pottery cup she made when she was six, inscribed with her favourite passion at the time, “chocolate”.

My younger daughter Rebecca is married and living in a flat a couple of miles down the hill and has already been through this process with her husband, Jim – ruthlessly cutting out of their lives the barnacles that accrue over the years.

But there were two of them making those decisions, they did it together. Maybe that’s another reason I find it difficult to say goodbye to my precious things.

Every time I have moved home in the past, there were two of us making the decisions. Desmond took the lead, working out what would go where and how much we should take with us.

Many years ago, I worked with Cyril Fletcher, the wonderful comedian. He told me: “Every time you have a lovely day, a really happy time, buy something. It doesn’t have to be expensive. But each time your eyes rest on it, it will remind you of that day.”

I must have had an awful lot of happy days. The flowery jug came from Provence, where we had a gorgeous chicken stew on the top of a mountain. The Art Deco silver and glass bowl filled with plastic grapes which Desmond and I bought one sunny Sunday when we went antique-hunting together in Berkshire.

The carved wooden flute player we bought on a 50th birthday holiday in Bali. The box made of different coloured stones came from a workshop near the Taj Mahal. The little ceramic horse we bought in China when my son was teaching there in his gap year.

Even a daft sequinned parrot means something to me – my friend Babs Powell gave it to me as a souvenir of the time I spent exiled in ITV’s celebrity jungle, eating peculiar bits of kangaroo.

As I fill my table with clutter, lost relationships spring into my mind. My generous friend Ismat who died of cancer far too young bought me two china Siamese cats.

The cut-glass dishes my mother used for dinner parties remind me of the evening I made a coffee pudding for her, and the gelatine turned into a thick rubber mat at the bottom of one of these. That must have been more than 50 years ago.

“I want them,” I told her flat-clearer impetuously. But they have no value at all and where on earth will I put them? Yet to part with them feels like an amputation.

The pastel portrait of my mother as a child stares at me reproachfully as I shove her in a box. Maybe a future grandchild will prize her, so I make an excuse to keep her.

But there’s no excuse at all to hold on to the Modigliani print I bought for my college room when I was 19. And yet when I see it, I remember that day so vividly, all my hopes mixed with shivering trepidation.

Surely, I can keep the embroidery signed by the Queen’s designer, Norman Hartnell, which he gave me when I interviewed him nearly 40 years ago. Isn’t that a historic souvenir? How could I possibly bin it?

So why not put everything in storage, so my children can chuck it all away and I don’t have to?

“Do it,” says one girlfriend. “Put everything except your bed and a knife and fork into storage. That way you can move into your place, piece by piece. Then get rid of the rest.”

“But you won’t,” says another. “You will hang on to that storage year after year, never visiting, never taking anything out. Don’t do it.”

I know the only answer is to throw it all away. But not today. Today I’ll carry on with my favourite pastime – taking photographs out of frames and putting them into albums.

And when, after my death, my children’s children open the albums and laugh at my red leather trousers or pick up with contempt a sequinned parrot or a ceramic horse and consign them to a dustbin, somewhere I’ll be watching them, and whispering: “Take care what you throw away. You may be throwing away my life.” – Daily Mail

Ways to get rid of the clutter

Professional organiser Isabelle de Grandpre says there are many reasons why people live with clutter and disorganisation, and almost all of these are based on fear – fear of losing someone’s memory, fear of moving forward, fear of throwing things out “in case” they need them again.

“The emotional reasons cannot be underestimated,” she says. “Many people hold on to things that remind them of a loved one, which is absolutely fine unless holding on to mounds of things that remind you of that person affects how you can live your life. If this is truly an issue for you, then find someone who can talk you through the process and don’t think you have to throw everything away.

“Keeping a few select items in a memory box can go a long way to easing the pain of getting rid of things. What is important, during this process, is to focus on how the ‘things’ make you feel and how you want to feel in your space.

“In addition, people live with clutter out of guilt – they don’t want to get rid of something they paid good money for. This is a good reason, especially at a time when money is tight, but then we probably should be more frugal when buying new things and really consider whether we need them. In addition, there are many people who live below the poverty line and what may be second-hand to one, is gold for another. Perhaps this may ease the guilt!

“Often, people are simply overwhelmed and this is mostly linked to the busy lives we lead as well as the fact that being organised is a life skill that not everyone has. Some people are naturally neat and tidy or were raised in an organised environment, while others simply did not witness systems and routines being implemented in their formative years and therefore do not have these skills.

“These are some of the many reasons why people live with clutter and disorganisation with embarrassment and fear being the main reasons why people do not reach out for help.

“Clutter and disorganisation, although not seen as major issues in the grand scheme of things, lead to increased stress, frustration and even discord in relationships. This should be motivation enough to get guidance in this area of your life, despite the embarrassment you may feel or the fear of having to face the emotions linked to your stuff.”

How do you make a start?

* Ask yourself how the things you are so adamant about keeping are adding value to your life and reflect on why you get anxious about letting your things go.

* Set a limit on your things and only buy what you know you have space for in your home. Then, when you do buy something, consider what you can get rid of to make space for the “newer” item.

* Don’t think because you have lots of space that you need to fill it. Having some free and open spaces will give you a sense of calm that is essential to revitalise yourself.

* Put time between your craving to buy something and actually buying it. When you avoid instant gratification it will probably save you loads of heartache and money.

* Your home is meant to be a refuge. You are meant to want to go there and relax and when you are ruled by your possessions, it becomes a prison. Make the mind shift and breathe a sigh of relief. - Daily News

* De Grandpre is a professional organiser and owner of the Durban-based Neat Freak. She is a member of the Professional Organisers Association Africa (POAA) and is a productivity specialist, trainer and speaker. See www.neatfreak.co.za

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