Clutter and ‘stuff’ in Jennifer’s own home…

I admit it, houses (rooms, even) with no books make me twitchy. I like colour and texture and stuff all around me. Drawers teeming with Sellotape, school reports, tea lights and broken pens, it’s a comfort. Show me a minimalist space or a grey-toned interior and I want to run amok with some jewel-coloured velvets and some jolly cushions. I like wallpaper – the busier the better – and rugs and knick-knacks and little religious statues and tealights and coloured glass from charity shops. On a good day – post cleaner, no kids in the house, me standing still and overcoming the urge to mess it all up – my home is a glorious riot of fun and comfort. It’s welcoming and vibrant and bright. Come on in!

As for the other 99% of the time, it’s a bit messy. There’s a never-ending line of bags in the hall – for charity, for the dry cleaners, I really must empty that shopping. The dresser in the kitchen creaks under the weight of slightly damaged commemorative mugs and occasionally fires one to the floor in protest. On side tables, magazines furl and yellow peacefully. Books line the staircase, the rooms, support the sofa with the wonky leg and splay themselves in the hope of being read across my bedroom floor.

I shriek with rage about the fact that no-one ever bloody well takes anything from the Waiting Room Of Death at the bottom of the stairs up to its rightful place, it’s all their fault and not mine. Drifts of vintage fabric – adorable patterns! I will make wonderful bedspreads from them, one day – and old Butlins postcards (don’t tell me you don’t love those John Hinde saturated colours) lie in wait behind doors that don’t fully open any more. The constant round of dusting, hoovering and attempting to do a Big Sort Out is merely the price that one pays to live in such bohemian decrepitude, I mean splendour.

Splendid in my splendour, I called a friend on my retro 1980s tomato phone (I know right!) and wondered aloud how another pal that’s moving overseas is transporting forty-odd years worth of stuff. A task that’s beyond comprehension, surely. Apparently not, when you have managed to tread lightly and eschew manically accumulating – not hoarding, no sirree – stuff and things and a full set of Babycham glasses. Imagine just being able to get on a plane and restart your life in another country straight away, unpacking your entire life in twenty minutes.

I take this in while watching the dresser petulantly nudge a badly glued plate onto the floor. A cat wriggles out of a pile of ancient Vogue magazines, behind which she has evidently made herself a fashionable little spot. It occurs to me that I don’t need a non-working lime green KitchenAid from 1968. It strikes me that maybe my Stuff is taking over, sliding inexorably from comfortable homeliness to unmanageable clutter.

I hold that thought whilst casually browsing eBay (top tip: Sunday nights is when all the good stuff goes). I stop bidding and start making piles for the charity shop: Definitely Keep, Definitely Maybe, Definitely Not, What Was I Even Thinking. I book a skip. It’s time for a change, though never be a minimalist. Oh, the local car boot sale is starting again? Maybe I could just take a look. My dresser is looking a little bare…

Jennifer Coyle, August 2020.