No This Isn’t Beirut: I Always Live Like This…
March 1, 2010
Way, way back in July of 2008, 2 years after moving into my current house, after the inevitable collapse of my relationship, I posted about my propensity for living in organised chaos. That only a strict housekeeper, preferably of Eastern European descent, could tame my wild and lackadaisical ways, and keep things neat and tidy, in a manner to which I very much wanted to become accustomed.
This is a picture of my living room on the day I moved in:
10:47am Not even a stray cat hair fluttering across the floor...
And this a picture taken 5 minutes later:
10:52am I know I put the car keys down somewhere...
I know it’s subtle, but if you look really hard, there are a few differences between the pictures. Whose abandoned Pepsi can is that for one thing?
You leave one little piece of junk mail unattended whilst you turn your back and next thing you know you’re living in a war-torn wasteland strewn with remote controllers, random Christmas puddings and empty mobile phone boxes, and trying to make chicken curry in an empty shoebox and drinking your martini’s out of an old pickle jar.
I try to defend my right to live like a bag lady (mostly to my mother btw) by pointing out that even within chaos there is order, even if it is way down at a microscopic level…or probably quantum level in the case of my spare room. I stand by the maths, and I know where of I speak – I’ve read Jurassic Park more than 20 times.
You maybe forgiven at this juncture for thinking that I am given to hyperbole. Let me stretch out my right arm, whilst sat here typing on my laptop at the dining table, and tell you what I touch.
An almost empty plastic bottle, half a roll of Christmas wrapping paper, a small book about Champagne, a Lidl flyer, an asthma inhaler, a DVD box set of The X-Files season four and an empty mobile phone box.
And I barely had to stretch for that.
I should be embarrassed. I am embarrassed. I have friends coming around tomorrow afternoon (early tomorrow afternoon), which means, having just finished my night shift, I have to put my bone-bastard-idle arse into gear and tidy.
Cleaning is easy. I can keep things clean. A long micro-fibre duster, a bottle of Flash, a squirt of bleach and a lot of hot water (having wood floors can be a blessing).
I just can’t pick up after myself. Somehow I struggle with the simple task of putting things away.
If this column eventually lies idle for more than 12 months, someone should probably call the emergency services, it’s likely I will have been buried in a landslide of books, magazines and Star Trek memorabilia.
Magda, wo sind sie?
WANTED: Cat-loving German housekeeper called Magda – cake baking skills and liberal views on pornography a must.
July 3, 2008
It has to be said that I am, no matter how you try and look at it, deeply disorganised.
“A place for everything and everything in its place” has never really held much sway with me…it’s more a case of “a place for everything but that has something else in its place and the thing from the place has been left lying around on the coffee table for four weeks”.
When you live with someone else, as I did for many years, part of your personality is repressed. Not by you, but by the other member(s) of your household.
My partner would, for example, tidy up after me. If I left a book on the table or a DVD in the player, or even an empty glass by the bedside, it would duly be removed and put in its rightful place.
Eventually I became accustomed to his anal tidying habits and although I never learned to adhere to them, plenty of moaning and nagging persuaded me to at least make an effort to pick up after myself.
I moved into my own house two years ago this month. My spare room is still half full of unpacked boxes and my desktop computer remains in bubble-wrap shoved away in a corner.
As I type this on my blood-stained laptop (seriously, don’t ask) I am surrounded by detritus – junk mail, important mail, computer hardware, video games, books, magazines, notebooks, pens, a pile of exercise books from my first two years of secondary school.
Crap breeds crap. Leave one item alone and untouched on the floor and three days later you will have a pile of objects that includes t-shirts, mobile phone boxes and blank CD’s.
All because there’s no one to make me put it away when I’ve finished using it. Common sense and a need for natural order and balance do not apply here. I am a filth wizard.
This is why I need a housekeeper. I need to be looked after. Not by a man, not in a co-dependant relationship kind of way. But in a firm, matronly manner.
She will be called Magda and she will have grey hair in a bun and large bosom to which she will clasp Lily and call her “meine liebchen”. She will feed me and clean my house and force to pick up after myself. My work shirts will be starched and my shoes will be shined.
Imagine coming home to the smell of baking lebkuchen and warm apple strudel, the scent of orange wood polish and gingerbread in the air. No clutter, mail neatly piled on the table ready to be sorted through. A tidy office where paperwork has a home and important files are easily accessible. Bed made, laundry done, cats fed and loved. I have a dream, and this is it.
Of course back in reality I can barely afford to put petrol in the car never mind hiring a full time household staff member. But all this disappears in a puff of wasted logic whilst I stare vacantly at the dusty television screen, feet on cluttered table and plastic glass of wine in hand.
Actually I do have real wine glasses again, temporarily, but that is a whole other story. This one is about my need for German dictatorship and unconditional love.
No one else is going to be able to stand my mess unless I pay them to. Hence why I shall never co-habit again and also why I am teaching my cats German.
