Hands off my books: Tidying up with Marie Kondo

As a dedicated clutterer of houses, I've got a bit of a love-hate relationship with programmes which deal with housework.  I watch programmes about hoarding and feel generally positive about myself.  You don't have to tunnel your way to the sofa in my house, yay!  I watch programmes like Tidying Up with Marie Kondo and feel a guilty pleasure in knowing I'll never put her theories into practice in my house, while still hanging on her every word.

I've read about the Konmari method of tidying of course.  Various hilarious articles by fellow clutterers decrying the method with "I found none of my clothes or any of the vegetables sparked joy and so I threw them out and hid the credit card bill for the replacements from my husband in a lovely little box" etc. 

I was impressed by how much presence a tiny woman can have, and how connected she seemed to the houses, but not so much their occupants.  She advises people to deal with their clutter in several stages, starting with clothes.  Then you move onto books, then papers, then miscellaneous, then sentimental items. 

The problem is that the method ignores the fact that people live together and may not enjoy the things the others enjoy.  In the programme this didn't become a problem for any of them, as we didn't have one partner ranting about having to live with 500 milk bottles or 200 Barbie dolls, and everything seemed to suggest that the Konmari method was helping relationships by dealing with areas of dispute.  But it would be very interesting to see how the method works with a collector of things their partner hates.

I have to say that some of the people in the series have more current clothes piled on their beds than I have owned in my whole lifetime.  I'm down with the clothes sorting - I don't have that many.  Although I did understand one client who complained that although the item of clothing did not spark joy, it did fit, and that's more than most items did.  Like many women who have had a baby, she was waiting to be able to fit into her pre-pregnancy clothes, and kept her maternity clothes too, so she could have another baby.  Three wardrobes don't really fit into the spark-joy method of clothes sorting.

It is in the area of books and papers that I would have the most problems.  Marie Kondo advises keeping no more than 30 books, ideally.  I have hundreds, and I like my books.  As for papers, I love some and hate others, but I don't think the tax authorities will accept "It just doesn't spark joy for me" as an excuse for not doing my tax return.

I enjoyed the programme, mainly because I like people, and seeing into people's homes and lifestyles is always interesting for me. On the whole, the method does appear to work for the people featured in the programme, but then they've all asked for help.  I'd call for help if I saw her approaching down the garden path.  My clutter sparks joy for me, and I'm keeping it.

Sex education, American style

Having had a heavy cold, and not feeling like doing anything too intellectual, I decided to take my sneezes to the sofa and watch something on Netflix.  I chose Sex Education, which is a Netflix Original written and directed by an irritating collection of writers and two directors, with a creator credit to Laurie Nunn. 

The first thing to know about the series, is that it is played with an English accent in some sort of parallel world where all the worst things about American education appear to have been transported to England.  The place and even the time of the series is left undecided, with a very American house, American school, and American high school values and problems transported to an English cast with English accents.  It jarred with me, very much, tripping me up with the inconsistencies which really would not be typical of any English setting.

There's a certain Stepford Wives vibe about the high school too - one of the main characters wears black and looks a bit gothy, but the rest of the school's rentacrowd seems to have been put through a advert-style superwash, they're clean and tidy and very much not the sort of crowd one sees pouring out of colleges and schools in the UK.  

There are all sorts of things which make you go "WTF?" For example: one of the girls in the group which are part of the main story, lives in what seems to be essentially a stately home.  Is it likely that one of the people at this state high school would be living there, in England?  No, she'd be at the private school around the corner or some public school or at finishing school.  It's almost a trope of the US coming-of-age film that there should be a poor girl and a rich girl made to rub along together.  It's not one in English film making on the whole because it's untrue.  We've had a lot longer to delineate the sides of the tracks. If it had been set a couple of years later with a university crowd, the mixing of high income and low income families would have been more believable. 

However, I'm a Quaker, and we are asked to find new light wherever we may come across it.  The meaning of that has always seemed to be that no matter how wrong something may be generally, there may be a nugget of truth in it.  And so I kept watching to see if the nugget of truth might be there.  

It's had universally good reviews as far as I can see, and that relates to the performances of the main actors, and the fact that it seems Americans can recognize truths in the situations dealt within the series very readily.  But that makes me wonder why they didn't go the whole hog and set the thing in the USA?  Maybe the disconnect and annoyance I felt when watching was deliberately caused.  I'm not sure what the English setting added to the programme. 

I got over the constant tripping up over these things, but it meant for me that it could never seem truthful, because it's in this fantasy place where US-style education  has taken over England.  Even the house where Gillian Anderson lives looked American.  It may be that it tells a truth for some US people about their teenage years.  It can't be a universal truth, because it doesn't resonate with me at all, and I was a teenager, once! It doesn't seem to tell the truth about anything contemporary... all the people with sexual problems would be googling for dear life, not paying good money to sit in an abandoned toilet with a virgin teenager, no matter how talented.

I'm assuming it can only be good for another series, as English schools do not allow people to stay in high school indefinitely, and the actors are likely to grow up inconveniently and stop looking like teenagers.  Although most of them don't look like any teenagers I ever met, anyway.

New year, new start

I have not blogged for a long time on my personal blog.  2018 was a truly awful year for me, in which my estranged husband had a stroke and needed help, my mother fell ill and needed nursing and then died at the end of June, and my partner Eelco died at the end of November.  I wrote an obituary for him on my Caliandris Pendragon blog here.

It feels like I was never able to take the time to adjust to the previous shock before another came along.  The death of Eelco so suddenly and so young (he was 47) was so shocking I barely felt it for about a month, emotionally.  I've heard people say that they were numb after a death before; I never really knew what it meant.  I do now.

The impact of his death has come in the last couple of weeks, and I have begun to miss him dreadfully.  Although we spent a lot of time apart, I talked to him in the mornings, we texted during the day and then talked all evening, and so I probably spent more time "with" him than a lot of people who live together.  

Speaking to someone recently, I realized that I was thinking of my future as one enormous blank, because all my plans had involved him.  We planned to live together permanently once he was able to.  His father has been seriously ill for a long time, and had deteriorated recently, and so Eelco had been helping his parents at weekends, and was unable to visit and stay with me as often. 

It dawned on me during that conversation that I needed to sort out my future for myself, and not wait for the universe to sort it out for me.  I have allowed my blogs to fester for about a year, since I wasn't able to blog while looking after my husband (we'd been separated since 2010) and then my mother.  Since her death I hadn't really felt like it, and since Eelco's I haven't really felt like doing anything at all.  

I've had a cold the last couple of days and so I've been watching a lot of Netflix.  So I thought I'd start my reblogging with a couple of reviews of the shows I've been watching.