MODERN STEREOTYPES
The hopeless declutterers
Hugo and Kitty have begun their tidying journey by piling everything that doesn’t spark joy in their lives into a heap in the middle of their minimalist, open-plan sitting room-kitchen. No one told them when they converted a barn in Chipping Magna that the cosy detritus of life would look like mess. That the oak prairies of designer space could only tolerate an OKA fauxphalaenopsis orchid without looking cluttered. Weird.
Kitty, entranced with their new smart telly and the ability to receive Netflix (“Isn’t The Crown wonderful?”), stumbled across Marie Kondo’s bossy-compelling Tidying Up. At yoga in the village hall, everyone was talking about how to fold their T-shirts vertically. She and Hugo have now been Kondoned. Who are they to be behind the cultural zeitgeist?
Staring at the sad pile of toys, old kitchen gadgets and bits of their children’s bicycles, they are overcome. They’d like it to vanish before their eyes, before Kitty re-establishes empathy with Dear Little Teddy, who accompanied her to boarding hell at St Mary’s. Hugo is distraught at the idea of getting rid of his books. In fact, he is manning up to forbid it. Who is this sterile person to tell him what to do? His grandfather’s copy of Lord Wavell’s gives him enormous joy and Freddie Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal may be a fallingapart paperback, but it is one of the finest books written. So there. Hugo’s literary taste may be eclectic but it is his own. And books do furnish a room.
Kitty is agonising over her clothes. The ones that “speak to her heart” – or rather to her tummy, as she can’t get into them any longer but she wore that Bruce Oldfield for Daddy’s 60th at The Garrick. But won’t Willow want to wear it some day? It’ll be vintage then.
Hugo and Kitty want to be mindful and forward-looking, but it isn’t very cosy. There’s a nice-sounding woman on Radio H-P (Gumtree for posh people) called Prue Chetwynd-talbot, who promises the restoration of order. She could stand by Kitty in the trenches of de-stuffing. And she sounds reassuringly out of an Evelyn Waugh novel, not a scary Japanese dominatrix.