Want to be happy? Chuck out every single possession you don’t LOVE
By JAN MOIR — who now has just two dinner plates left...
MY name is Jan moir and I am a junkaholic. Until all too recently, my home was stuffed with collectibles and assorted clutter. a French egg-holder with hen-shaped handles. embossed stationery boxes with silk tassels. a sweet collection of silver ice buckets. Dozens of blankets, cupboards crammed with towels, enough bed linen to run a small hotel.
If the entire cast of Les miserables had moved in overnight, I could have accommodated them all, sheets-wise — and given them each a boiled egg in an amusing ceramic egg cup for breakfast.
I was in the grip of what I now see was an addiction, a very modern affliction. I wasn’t exactly a hoarder but equally, I never let anything go. I used to think it was right and proper to keep every book I ever read, including the mangiest paperback from three decades ago.
my thinking was, why have one pen in a jar on your desk when you could have a dozen, including that novelty one with the Donald Duck head and three from hotel chains? and I’m not throwing out that red glitter glue pen, it will come in handy next Christmas.
Ditto the three pairs of secateurs, even though I no longer had a garden. Likewise the never-worn clothes and the sad, unloved handbags that sulked in a corner of my wardrobe like leather orphans. There are only two of us but my house was full of stuff, stuff, stuff like that, silting up at the seams, ready to withstand the siege that never came, a landfill of life that grew every year.
Then I saw the light. Or rather, I had the light thrust upon me. my circumstances over the past six years have been a continual boomerang of moving into one home while the other was refurbished, moving back, moving out again, moving somewhere else.
and each time we moved, the cupboard spaces seemed to get smaller and the surroundings less hospitable to the cavalcade of — let’s be honest — junk I was carting around. It became a pain. I began to ask myself, do I really need all this rubbish? For what good purpose?
The turning point came when we had a flood in a storage cupboard which ruined all my lovely bed linen, collected over many years. I spent a long time secretly mourning my Italian 500-threaders, but it changed everything.
Realisation dawned that not only could I survive without my beloved velvet counterpane and four sets of bobble-trimmed pillowcases, but life was actually much easier without them.
Less choice but more space. Cry freedom from quilts! and from the wreckage of those sodden sheets, I emerged a new woman; a born-again minimalist.
OnCeyou decide to reduce everything cluttering up in your life, there is no shortage of people out there to help you. a woman called marie Kondo has become famous for inventing the Kon-mari method of tidying. In her bestselling book, The Life-Changing magic Of Tidying Up: The Japanese art Of Decluttering and Organising, she argues that unless you truly, deeply, madly love an item, it has no place in your home. Let’s hope she makes an exception for husbands.
marie also shows her readers how to fold jumpers into neat, woolly packages and advises them to avoid buying fancy storage solutions such as hampers and hat boxes because they only encourage hoarding.
Flamboyant interior designer Laurence Llewelyn- Bowen preaches the same mantra. He never designs bathrooms with lots of shelves and cupboards because ‘they’ll only get filled up with bottles of gunk’.
meanwhile, self- help guru Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project has sold millions of copies. She believes that happiness begins with a tidy wardrobe and a calm home.
To this end she subdivides clutter into categories such as crutch clutter (things you wear but know you shouldn’t, like horrible but comfy leggings), buyer’s remorse clutter (hanging on to expensive bad purchases because you can’t admit you made a mistake), aspirational clutter (high heels you can’t walk in, a tapestry you never finished), freebie clutter (hideous family gifts) and nostalgic clutter (souvenirs from an earlier life). It has one thing in common — it all has to go.
each of these good thoughts made perfect sense to me. especially the buyer’s remorse.
The most expensive thing in my wardrobe was a beautiful pink jacket purchased in a moment of madness in new York and never worn. It made me look like a peeled armadillo — but I couldn’t admit the mistake, so I kept it for years. Once I had packed it off to Dress For Success (a charity which helps to empower women by supplying them with professional attire), I was on my way.
as the months marched on, I learnt to live without. Clothes were brutally culled into a capsule wardrobe; boring but brilliant in the morning rush.
Boxes of books were taken to charity shops — although I can never part with my copy of The Great Gatsby, so don’t ask.
In the kitchen, I chucked or donated everything that wasn’t vital to my new, streamlined existence. The pasta- maker, the Jamie Oliver flavour- shaker, the unnecessary fruit- slicers, the surfeit of cutlery, crockery and pans.
now we could never have anyone round for dinner because we only have enough basics for the two of us. But why not? We always went out instead of entertaining at home, anyway.
Look around at my shelves and surfaces and you will find not one ornament, knick-knack or keepsake in my entire home. What is all that stuff anyway? It’s only showing off. Photographs and treasured mementoes are packed away in a box, desks clear of clutter to promote clear thoughts.
Visitors think we have just moved in or are in the process of moving out, but that is the way we have come to like it. I love that transient feeling that living without brings; the belief that this place is not the end or the final destination, that you are not tied by 1,000 invisible threads to 1,000 curated objects that you’ve convinced yourself you love.
Instead, at any given moment I could simply pack a (small) suitcase and walk out of the door without regret. Recently, the fashion and homewares designer Orla Kiely declared that British people hoard pointless clutter and have ‘ too much stuff’. It’s a bit rich coming from someone with a homewares line featuring more than 50 products, including a flower-print garden bin, but she’s right.
This country is a rubbish tip of useless gadgets and curios impulse-bought and crammed into cupboards or dubiously displayed on mantelpieces. The same objects move, like a shifting sand dune of tat, from home clearout to car boot sale to market stall to auction house to antique shop to jumble sale to charity shop, then back under the sink again. Kiely confessed that her products will ultimately contribute to this surfeit of bric- a- brac, but she is unrepentant. ‘I am adding to it,’ she admitted. ‘ But I hope people who buy my stuff will keep it for ever.’ Yet, just as one man’s objet trouvé is another man’s ashtray, one woman’s prized leafprint Kiely napkin is another’s despised duster. and still the mountain of jumble gets bigger and bigger. Programmes such as BBC2’s antiques Road Trip really don’t help because they glorify junk. It is a format which finds antiques experts — sometimes celebrities — competing against each other to buy stuff nobody wants, which is then sold at auction and bought by people with nothing better to do.
In one recent show, the team gaily bought a brass trumpet, a sandalwood lizard, a pair of brass dogs and a murano glass bowl big enough to bathe a baby. WITH the best will in the world, none of these things would pass the William morris test: ‘Have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’ Yet in the space of one short television show they were purchased, sold and purchased again; more jumble to tumble onto the national pile.
Please don’t think I’m being a terrible snob about this. People love different things, even ugly things, for all sorts of complicated reasons — for all sorts of lovely reasons. and there is nothing wrong with that.
It’s just that so much antiquing and acquiring and shopping and displaying and cupboard-filling is just a waste of time, a reassurance of your own existence that you can, believe me, live without.
Once upon a time I, too, believed that surrounding myself with a comfort blanket of things, that suffocating under stuff, was the outward expression of happy consumerism, the only way to live.
now that I’m a junkaholic, I realise I am so much happier without it all, and that’s the way forward.
You still don’t agree? Come over to my place and we can have some tea and a chat about it. You’ll have to bring your own cup.