The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
I really must clean up... now where’d I throw the toaster?
Despite living in a tip, Rab knows where everything is. It’s all over the place. Only the poltergeist and the absence of a butler, cook and maid, however, are preventing him from tidying up
My house is a tip. I don’t want to sound melodramatic but it is. It’s always the same when I return after staying at proper houses.
I step in the door of my slum in the suburban ghetto and there’s always a peculiar smell and the wooden floors feel like your foot might go through them, and there’s just stuff everywhere.
Even with the attic stuffed to the gunnels, the rest of the joint has junk everywhere. Nobody’s fault but mine, obviously. I put a bag of books or papers or even tools down in July 2008 and, in September 2017, they’re still sitting in the same place. Odd chairs sit in peculiar places, commandeered for some forgotten purpose, and years later there they remain.
It’s the hypocrisy that gets me. I spend hours – seriously, about four or five hours – cleaning friends’ houses when I’ve been staying there and looking after their beasts. But my own house hardly gets touched. I’m too busy thinking. Always thinking. Thinking about writing that novel, about doing more exercise, about not spending too much time on the computer (must Google how to stop doing that or look for a book about it on Amazon).
When I return home, I see the place more objectively and determine that something must be done. By somebody. Some time. I draw up to-do lists, room by room, but after a couple of weeks the familiar torpor has set in. The odd thing is, I spend much more time tidying the garden. Gardening is really just glorified tidying up.
It’s outdoor housework, so to say. But at least it’s outdoors and healthy, with soil to sink one’s hands in and bosky bits and bobs to gather. Inside, it’s all six-month-old sausage rolls found down the back of the couch and odd bits of wreckage that suggest the presence of a poltergeist.
I think I am my own poltergeist and will, from time to time, bung objects about my property, perhaps because they have stopped working or perhaps because I am having an existential crisis and don’t know what our purpose is here on Earth. I expect you do the same, thinking to yourself: “Why are we here? I have no idea. Perhaps it would help if I bunged this broken toaster at the wall.”
Part of the problem is that my house is too small, which is ridiculous. There are more rooms than I need but it’s still not enough.
For someone who grew up sharing a room with his brother, it’s ridiculous having expectations of a mansion to oneself. Even then, I’d soon fill it with rubbish. Recently, at a historic house crammed with antiques and artworks, I remember thinking: “It’s lucky they didn’t believe in decluttering.”
Ideally, I should have a butler, a maid, two cleaners and a cook but when I applied to the Government for funding, they considered the matter carefully – they told me so – before turning my application down.
Consequently, I shall never vote again, unless a new party comes along vowing: “A butler and maid for every household!”