A date with Sarah-Kate; Kate’s home truths

The queen of decluttering messes with Sarah-Kate

I’m sure I’m not the only person transfixed by the phenomenon of tiny Japanese “organisation consultant” Marie Kondo. She’s sold millions of books advising the slatternly among us how to fold things up and biff things out, and now she has her own show on Netflix, TidyingUp.

You can tell just by looking at her that Marie’s a person who knows where to put things. Her preppy clothes are immaculate, her make-up flawless and even her hair knows to not have one strand out of place.

As a tall person with a frizzy mop who wears clothes often scooped out of the tragically neglected handwashing pile, I bow to her perfection.

Obviously, I was in the moment the TV show dropped and watched tiny wee Marie arrive on the doorstep of a messy American family living in a small apartment who after a year had not properly unpacked. The place was stuffed fit to burst.

After a round of polite hellos (hers) and apologies (theirs), Marie dropped to the floor like a beautiful snowflake and introduced herself to the floorboards. Frankly, she was lucky to find them, such was the mess.

She then proceeded to share with the family that they needed to go through the apartment in zones and choose what in their lives brought them joy, which they could keep, and what they needed to ditch, after saying a heartfelt thank you.

Although when I say the lovely Marie shared this with them, actually, she doesn’t speak much English, so nearly all her advice was dished out by an equally lovely translator.

I want the translator’s job. And I don’t want to be lovely. I want to say to this particular family that instead of blubbing to Marie that their bombsite of an apartment doesn’t feel like home because of all the piles of crud exploding out of every corner, “How about you don’t buy so much crud?”

Should 12-year-olds really have piles of new clothes they’ve never even worn? Those threads can’t have brought anyone joy and if they haven’t done anything, why thank them?

On top of that, if your husband – although extremely good-looking and a guitar player and a lovely dad and fun – doesn’t know where anything is because he doesn’t cook or do any housework? Um, Marie can’t fix that, but in my household, a swift kick in the pants might.

I might also mention to Marie that if she turned up at my house to declutter it, I’d want her to do the actual clean-up, not just explain how to roll up T-shirts in a drawer, then float off in a cloud of loveliness, leaving me to do the actual rolling.

It’s likely I’d then add that it’s all very well to watch her kneel serenely as she folds up a fitted sheet, but that some of us need three sumo wrestlers and a forklift to get us up from kneeling.

Marie, I’m pretty sure, would fire me. But her translator would do it supersweetly, so it’d be OK.