I’M WAGING A NEW WAR ON HOME FRONT
From little plastic landmines to garish goo, junk has made an insidious hostile takeover – and it ends now
FORGET the War on Waste, I’m fighting the War on Crap.
While I’ve happily surrendered my plastic bags, the new ground zero in this battle is plastic toys.
From Coles’ immensely successful and uber-annoying Little Shop giveaway to the unhappy surprises inside McDonald’s Happy Meals, enough is enough.
These little pieces of plastic have no point other than as future landfill and debris upon which parents can snap an ankle.
Who among us has not been crippled after stepping upon one of these little landmines littered across the lounge room floor?
I’d sooner my kids collected actual plastic bags than toys.
I’ll admit I’m hardly a poster child for environmental issues. Sure, trees and animals are great but I’d much rather focus on the humans. Still, apparently people need a healthy world to live in so I’m trying to do my part.
But to be honest, that’s just an incidental bonus in my War on Crap.
By the end of every day, I look around to realise that there has been an insidious yet obvious hostile takeover of my home by ... crap.
From letters piled up on the kitchen bench to items formerly known as foodstuff falling out of school bags to the nasty and unidentified items I find in the children’s rooms, I’m constantly under attack.
I’ve already initiated an interior-wide ban on slime – aka the bane of my life.
My children spend hours combining all sorts of useful items like contact lens solution, glue and shaving cream in order to produce a substance that is the definition of useless.
What are you even meant to do with it? Other than make a mess and annoy adults, that is.
Every time I open a Tupperware container I find yet another batch of some garishly coloured goo. Under my new policy, any slime found inside immediately goes down the drain – fulfilling its true destiny.
But slime is just the start, I’m going Full Metal Jacket in my War on Crap.
Any mail not addressed to me now has 12 hours to be read and filed. After that it’s in the bin. The recycling bin, of course.
I realise we may miss some bills under this system change, but that’s a risk I’m more than willing to take. Besides, if they really want their money they know where we live.
To be honest, this scorched earth policy comes naturally to me.
Following a number of moves, I’ve honed my ability to max out on minimalism.
Some may say I’m missing the sensitivity chip, but I say sentimentality is for suckers.
Keep the memories, cut the crap.
Of course, every now and then I go that step too far. Such as this week.
In an effort to prevent our children going straight to hell, we finally decided it was our duty as lapsed Catholics to get them Confirmed.
Unfortunately, this led to some awkward questions – and I’m not even talking about lying to the priest about how often we attend Mass (answer: never).
No, apparently we were meant to keep the sacred candle the kids were given at their Baptism. But those hunks of wax, along with our marital
candle, were long ago sacrificed at the altar of austerity. How was I to know that a decade after their birth we’d suffer from a crisis of Catholic guilt?
The only area in the home that remains a safe zone is my wardrobe. It’s literally no man’s land. As in, my husband has been forced to find another closet in which to keep his five band T-shirts from the 1990s and three pairs of shorts.
I can just never bring myself to cull old clothes. It’s not like I buy quality either. But what if Supre low-rise jeans and boob tubes come back in?
I’m already regretting getting rid of my Sportsgirl tencel overalls from 1994.
It’s not so much nostalgia about times gone past but thighs gone past. It’s something to show my grandchildren: “Look, Nanna used to fit into a size zero!”
However, in a bid to engage in the War on Debt, I’ve vowed to increase my visits to second-hand shops. Not only do I help humanity but I participate in recycling. Plus I can donate all my old crap.
And in this war, that’s a win-win.