Spring nesting

How clearing out the clutter is helping us feel in control

There is an enormous poignancy to facing our greatest peacetime crisis while outside, the sun is shining, the birds are singing and spring is doing its utterly magnificent thing. It’s the time of year when many of us traditionally clean, sort and generally give our homes a little love, and this year for some of us it has taken on an extra urgency, a renewed importance. When the world outside feels terrifying, it is natural to want to make the world inside more tranquil. When what faces us is out of our control, we naturally turn to what we can control: our homes.

Which is why this weekend you may have noticed people suddenly applying a new gusto to their spring cleaning and clear-outs. Friends who only last week (was it really only last week?) were managing departments, running shops and teaching children, are now applying that same focus to cleaning limescale from bathroom taps.

In the time when we are all pretending finally to read Middlemarch or learn Danish, what is really happening around the country is that wardrobes are being Marie Kondo’d, bookcases alphabetised and it’ll-do-for-now furniture being cast out on to the pavement (though please don’t do that: see below).

There is nothing like being confined to barracks to make you notice every cobweb, smudge on the paintwork, the wonky, the wobbly, the unlovely and unloved parts of our homes. While we were hurrying about in our hitherto deadline-driven lives it was easy to think, “Oh, I’ll get to that,” and then it was the weekend and the last thing you wanted to do was to take a toothbrush to the greying grout.

But now here we are, with many of us working from home for the foreseeable future, and every day feels like Sunday.

Please tell no one, but I even started darning last week – hoping that this busy-fingeredness could keep the anxiety at bay, even for a short while.

But now is a good time – when you are not doing your own mini Ofsted inspection in the dining room or obsessively stalking your local

Facebook group, filled now with people using words like data modelling and whole-house isolation, where once it was all bins, parking and dog poo – to consider some soothing domestic tasks.

Tackle the overstuffed wardrobes, crowded book cases and longforgotten toys a little at a time. Councils may begin to struggle with regular collections, so perhaps keep bulky waste and trips to the tip for another time. Likewise, many charity shops are either closed or not taking more donations. So sort through your things, pack them up, and ideally put them somewhere where you won’t be tripping up over them every second until normal service is resumed.

If you are self-isolating because you may have the coronavirus, put any personal waste such as used cleaning materials in a tied plastic bag, then put it into a second bin bag. Many councils are advising you store this bag safely away from other people in your home for 72 hours before putting it in the outside bins, in order to lower the risk of the virus being passed on.

Nurturing our surroundings is one of the simplest and most effective ways of nurturing ourselves. Focusing on what we can do, and seeing increased solitude as an opportunity as much as an obligation is a powerful way of nurturing our wider communities too. Doing the right thing, the bright thing, by staying home is all the more appealing when that is an uplifting place to be.

Debora Robertson is the author of ‘Declutter The Get-real Guide to Creating Calm From Chaos’ (£12.99), published by Kyle Books