I’m a great fan of ‘Grand Designs’, the Channel Four series where people with more money than sense design and build their dream house in the teeth of contrary advice, technical hitches, foul weather and dwindling funds.
The thing is, while architecturally spectacular, few of these edifices are remotely homely – their vast kitchens sterile as operating theatres, acres of glass and polished concrete or salvaged oak beams and grass roofs. Curiously, none of them seem to spend any money on curtains or blinds. Nor do their unsentimental occupants bring anything with them from their previous abode. There’s nary a vestige of comfortable clutter that says a family of untidy adults, grubby children and unpredictable pets live here.
I can’t be doing with the current vogue for minimalism. I come from a long line of maximalists, falling heir by default to my mother’s stuff, my mother-in-law’s and Auntie Mollie’s – who famously bought two of everything in case one broke down or wore out and believed that unless you had everything on display, people would think you had nothing. Boxes and bags of quality bed linens, embroidered tablecloths, napkins, crocheted doilies, cutlery, ‘good’ china, lamps, ornaments and knick-knacks of questionable taste, including a dinner gong and a flight of three solid brass ducks which flew up her parlour wall in the days before it could be interpreted as an ironic statement.
Were there room, I could host an Antiques Roadshow in my roofspace. Yet these are collective records of lives lived before mine, whose DNA I’ve inherited along with the stuff.
From mud hut to chateau, the dwelling-house as showcase has been an intrinsic part of our social history, where the occupants have personalised their living space with artefacts of usefulness and/or beauty according to their taste. Had our ancestors throughout the centuries thrown out everything that became outmoded, there wouldn’t have been a museum in the country – or Dickinson’s Real Deal.
People are natural hoarders. We acquire stuff in a variety of ways. We buy of necessity, we buy of wanting to possess, we buy for the sake of not going home empty-handed. Often, we inherit, whether we want it or not, then develop a sentimental attachment because of the item’s association with a place, a time, a person we valued. Perhaps we nurture an interest in the past that shaped us and its artefacts for purely aesthetic reasons – which is why I have an Edwardian sofa that’s too fragile to sit on, but makes a lovely statement on the landing.
Places like IKEA unsettle me. They make me want to jettison everything I have and start again. This is to fall prey to the ‘retail imperative’ that dictates change for change’s sake in the eternally revolving carousel that is fashion – stylish, but soul-less. I come away in a glow of conscious virtue having purchase only tea-lights and yet another tin-opener.
This rapid turnover feeds the equally rapid spread of charity shops and the virtue-signalling enthusiasm of a new generation for ‘retro’ and ‘vintage’, which is no bad thing considering the rate at which we’re abusing the world’s natural resources.
We’re urged to cut down, pare back, recycle, make do with less in our lives. Japanese minimalist Marie Kondo has already wrought havoc in the wardrobes of hardened hoarders, reducing their possessions to ‘only things that spark joy’. Hot on her heels comes Margareta Magnusson with an advisory handbook for the elderly called ‘The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning’, exhorting the long-in-the-tooth to get rid of all surplus stuff in their houses while they’re still able-bodied, making their latter years clutter-free and sparing their families the tiresome task of disposing of their goods when they’ve gone. WHAT?! Talk about “here’s your hat and what’s your hurry?”
Well, here’s one person who’s refusing ‘to go gentle into that good night’. I’m resolved to sit it out till Judgement Day with my three generations of family lore, love and inheritance intact, my store of memories undepleted.
Note to Daughter Dear: I can promise you darling, you’ll have some handlin’!
