You know that t-shirt, the one you always reach for when you're feeling blah? You thought you'd left it in that dreadful hotel with the pink bedspread that cheered up The Girl, and the gloopy cherry jam for breakfast, and the caged bird that was your only wolf-whistle in years. You'd hung it behind the bathroom door and promised yourself you wouldn't forget it. But you did, didn't you? You've been mourning it ever since. Nothing else makes you feel as comforted as that t-shirt.
Have you still not done all of your holiday laundry? Christ. You're an even worse homemaker than I thought. Hang on . . . what's this? Look, it's the bloody t-shirt! It's been in the laundry basket all this time. You just needed to dig a little deeper.
That lost novel. You know the one. The one that felt like an almost-perfect fit. You can't pretend it's hanging on a hook in a run-down bathroom in Boulogne and just buy a new one. You can bury it under a pile of other stale crap if you like but one day you're just going to have to dig it out and put it on a warm cycle.
p.s. But I think you should firmly maintain your stance on ironing.
5 comments:
Oh absolutely no ironing - clothes or novel. Life is too short and too fun without ironing. Ironing! Represents everything wrong with housework - after all the clothes are clean aren't they? What do they need to be ironed for? I like crumpled. More friendly.
Still impressed with your ability to relate everything to the book. What about fridges that have black gunge in the draining hole that you have to spend hours fishing about in with a coat-hanger or the problem of how to tidy away piles of Things That Might One Day be Useful consisting of things like bits of string, blu-tack, a few old nails mixed in with all the unexciting-looking post you can't bear to open - can you relate that to writing at all? (I don't dare to think what that says about me.)
Ah, well I have a new policy on Things That Might One Day Be Useful - use 'em right now or bin 'em. Bin the bits, they will not be useful and even if they are you will forget you have them and go out to buy new bits and then end up with even more bits to store away. It's Bit Madness. And I have the same policy with words or ideas - I'm not great one for filing away, because they never seem quite as good and fresh when you get them out again, I find. And there will always be new words, and new ideas, to get excited about.
This may be because I come from a family who have never thrown anything away. Ever.
I know you are right. It's just that I hate the idea of waste somehow. Not even just in an environmental way. Just in a wasteful kind of way.
I definitely suffer from the can't find it therefore buy a new one syndrome. Currently I have seven sets of scissors I can't find. I might need to take a trip to the shop...
I used to be a hoarder, but when my entire life became taken over by toys something had to give. (But we sometimes gather up all the 'bits' and make a collage. And some of those get to stay.)
My life's been taken over by toys and we don't even have children. We just have a weakness for toys...
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