Everything must go!

I know I said that organising drawers was at the very bottom of my ‘to-do’ list, but that was several weeks ago and things change. The barrel is being scraped and sorting out drawers and cupboards is my activity of last resort. I’ve been surprisingly ruthless at getting rid of things because I have decided that life needs to be lived on a smaller scale. It is possible that the government has decided this for me by severely limiting our movements and therefore our horizons, but I have taken on the challenge with enthusiasm. If lockdown doesn’t end soon there’ll be nothing left in the house.

Obviously, living things have been exempted from the giant clearout – all humans, cats and plants have been given indefinite leave to remain. But what else is irreplaceable? I was reading about a Finnish man called Petri Luukkainen who put every one of his possessions into storage and then took out one item every day for a year to decide if he still needed it. His view is that you think you need things because you see them all the time, but when you stop seeing them you often forget they ever existed. It made me wonder what I absolutely couldn’t live without. What would I still remember if I hadn’t seen it for a year?

I’d find life very hard without basics like a bed, a chair, an oven or Spotify, but those things can be replaced. All the pictures on our walls are irreplaceable, but saving all of them is not in the spirit of the thing, so I’d have to choose one, which is incredibly difficult. I am attached to all of them, some even more than others because of sentimental reasons or because I find them so beautiful. If I had to choose one it would have to be the large hand-coloured etching of mosques by Meg Dutton that hangs over the fireplace. I first saw it at the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, but I didn’t buy it then and it took two years of mulling before I tracked it down and finally bought it. It’s absolutely beautiful, we look at it every day and it reminds me of my annual outing to the Summer Exhibition with an art-loving friend, which is one of the highlights of my year. Although perhaps not this year.

So, now I’m living in a house with one picture, but what else couldn’t I live without? It would have to be the grandfather clock, bought on a whim in the Black Forest in Germany. I can’t imagine that many people buy a grandfather clock on a whim, but we did and we like it more all the time. I’m going to add our photobooks to the ‘must keep’ pile. The memories of all our holidays are contained in those pages. Quite literally – if it weren’t for those books documenting each holiday I think we’d struggle to remember much of what we’ve seen. Temples, deserts, forts, markets, palaces and mountains all jumble together in my brain. Not to mention all the camels I’ve met.

It’s no use, I couldn’t manage with only a bed, a chair, an oven, Spotify, an etching, a grandfather clock and photobooks. I just don’t think I was cut out to live life on a smaller scale.