Anti-clutter guidethat needs to be thrown out
There are seven drawers in our kitchen, apart from the one with the knives and forks. This is a list of what I found when I opened one of them. A mouth organ; a pair of scratched spectacles; a broken earring; three batteries, presumably used; six pencils, all but one of them broken; one plastic (curtain?) ring; five birthday cake candles; five identical passport photos of my son; two lightbulbs, out of their boxes so therefore presumably used; one media pass to Conservative Party press conferences for the 1987 general election; a small camera; a bottleopener; a tiny plug; a comb; a mockvelvet scrunchy hair-bow; a golf ball; six golf tees.
A tube of lipsalve from Boots; a pack of cards; a yellow crayon; five hairclips; two 1p stamps; a packet of nails; a DVD for a film called Snake Dance; an old Trivial Pursuit card (first question: ‘Where are the famed Kew Gardens?’ answer: ‘London’); a receipt from Schott music, Great Marlborough Street, for £15, dated 18.12.15.
A combination lock, unopened, and with no sign of its combination; six needles; a 1977 Queen’s Jubilee commemorative coin in a plastic envelope; six tickets for Count Arthur Strong at the London Palladium this coming May; two soluble Solpadeine tablets; the head of a screwdriver; a tiny yo-yo, perhaps from a Christmas cracker; a bottle opener; three corks; an old-fashioned film for a camera that no longer works; a Tate Gallery membership card, expiry date December 2014.
Are you still with me? It so happens that this week I am reviewing a book called The Art Of Discarding, which its publishers confidently describe as ‘The book that inspired Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying’. It has, they add, already sold two million copies in Japan.
‘Throwing stuff out: it’s a fundamental issue,’ reads the very first sentence. Quite clearly, I am the target audience. The chapter titles give the gist of what is to follow: 1: Don’t keep it ‘for now’. 2: Avoid ‘temporary storage – decide now!’ 3: ‘Sometime’ never comes. 4: ‘Really convenient!’ to somebody else – irritating junk to me. 5: Nothing is sacred. 6: If you’ve got it, use it.
And so forth. On page seven, the author squeezes the message of the entire book into a single sentence. ‘It’s very simple: keep things you use and discard those you don’t.’ The rest of The Art Of Discarding is little more than a repetition of this basic message, over and over and over again. Even though it is an extremely short book – 168 pages with big type and a lot of blank space – it seems much too long. A recurrent phrase is ‘As I’ve said already’. If only the author had followed her own strictures, and discarded anything unnecessary, she could have boiled it down to a couple of paragraphs at most.
Like many self-help manuals with a message too brief to fill up the available pages (diet books, for instance, are all longwinded variations on two words: ‘Eat Less’), The Art Of Discarding includes a survey conducted by the author from her circle of acquaintances. ‘The majority of responses were from the Tokyo area, but some were also from Osaka, Kyushu, Shikoku, Chubu and Hokuriku,’ she adds, helpfully.
Asked ‘Are there any things in your everyday life you find difficult to store?’, virtually everyone said: ‘Yes.’ Men said books first and clothes second, while women said clothes first and books second. Nagisa Tatsumi then reveals herself as a leading figure in the IBO (Institute of the Bleeding Obvious) when she says that people find it hard to get rid of books because they have ‘high information content’, and clothes and bags ‘because these are things that are worn or carried’ and ‘people tend to grow fond of them’. She has also discovered – tarantara! – that people don’t like to get rid of ‘things with special emotional significance’. She concludes this section with the words: ‘Letting stuff pile up will only cause trouble in the end. Be brave and get rid of it.’ Thank goodness she never rootled around in our kitchen drawers, or I’d never hear the end of it. And here we
come to the nub of the matter. What sort of ‘trouble’ can this pile-up of stuff really cause? To take just one example, the miniature Christmas cracker yo-yo has probably been in our drawer for a good 10 years, along with the broken earring, the Trivial Pursuit card, the mouth organ etc, etc, but it has never caused us the slightest trouble. What sort of trouble does Tatsumi expect a miniature yo-yo to cause? Does she think it will one day leap out of its drawer, Colditz-style, and yo-yo its way around the kitchen, creating havoc and discontent?
In fact, all the stuff in our drawers – crayons, golf-tees, lightbulbs – has always behaved in a very civilised manner, and with the utmost discretion: we don’t hear a squeak out of it, from one year to the next.
She reserves a particular scorn for those of us who keep things because ‘they may come in useful’. ‘Little girls dream that some day a prince will come along – but that day is never likely to arrive,’ she says. Well, yes and no. I agree that I am unlikely to put a broken earring, a used lightbulb or a 1987 media pass to good use, but who is to say that one day I won’t be in need of a golf ball, a cork, a mouth organ, or a miniature yo-yo?
‘Think like this!’ she keeps saying, in her bossy-boots way, before telling us what to do. ‘The key is to know yourself. You’re not someone else. You’re you.’ Words of wisdom, indeed! One thing is for sure: I’m certainly not her. ‘If you keep this in mind,’ she says, ‘then you’ll know that you don’t want things that don’t seem necessary.’
Aha! That’s where she’s wrong. You see, I DO want things that don’t seem necessary – in fact, as unnecessary as possible, and the more of them the merrier. What I don’t want is for my house to look like a science lab, with everything spick and span, as though ready for a post-mortem. ‘Don’t you think our city is beautifully laid-out, Mr Fields?’ said the mayor of Christchurch in New Zealand when he was showing W C Fields around. ‘Yes, indeed!’ replied Fields. ‘Tell me, when did it die?’ There is a particular sort of house, generally lived in by trendy architects or ‘design consultants’, and featured in colour supplements. Everything in it is immaculately ‘cutting-edge’ and uncluttered, with spotless surfaces, and nothing human in sight. Staring at these photographs, I find myself yearning to sneak in a child of five and let him loose with a bottle of tomato ketchup and a pack of magic markers. Perversely, for someone who has sold two million of them, Ms Tatsumi has a thing against books, and never stops coming up with reasons to get rid of them. In a chapter called Nothing Is Sacred, she declares that ‘when you die, it will all be rubbish. If you were to die right now in a traffic accident, that album you’ve kept so carefully will be thrown away. Your books will be bought up as a job lot by a second-hand bookshop. Wouldn’t it be better to clear things out instead and enjoy a clutter-free life while you can?’
This is a curious argument, suggesting that human existence is just a dress-rehearsal for death. The book grows increasingly nutty as it goes on. Having exhausted her basic message – discard anything that isn’t useful – by page two, she turns her fire on everything else. ‘Think like this!’ she says. ‘The moment you notice something is the moment to get rid of it. If you don’t, it may stay there for a long time.’
She then urges parents to indoctrinate their children in the sacred art of binning. ‘Every year, say on or around the child’s birthday, get them to decide what to throw away.’ And a Happy Birthday to you, too! Has she ever met a child? Or do they do things differently in Japan? Under the heading Dolls, Soft Toys, she writes: ‘Through my survey I was surprised to discover that many Japanese people find dolls and soft toys difficult to throw away because “they have eyes”, or “they might curse you”.’
Who knows? Perhaps something was lost in translation, such as sense. For the time being, I’m planning to stick with my strict non-binning policy, with the possible exception of this book.
‘I’m yearning to sneak in a child of five and let him loose with a bottle of tomato ketchup’