Sometimes I wonder if the primary evidence of my existence is mess. My pet comet tail. It might surprise my family to know that I am not too fond of it, I just somehow can’t detach it. I’m pretty certain no-one likes mess too much. It is one of those things you pretend not to notice, like when someone has very bad breath. In fact, the opposite. I am likely to walk into a tidy house and exclaim, ‘Oh! it’s so tidy,’ in a breathy kind of way, part impressed, part appalled, as if I have never seen a tidy house before.
I have tried different strategies to manage it. I have tried to eat or wear the same thing day after day after day (boring). I have tried eating fewer meals (hungry) or more readymade food, (expensive, joyless). Then I decided that the only way out of it was to get other people to manage my mess. My thinking went - I am the Senior Executive of this house, I will hire someone to look after the mess. That worked. In a way. I could walk back into the kitchen that someone else had tidied and think, ‘Oh! it’s so tidy,’ in that same, breathy (now exultant) way. But then, then the shit storm begins, because you can’t find anything.
At the start, it is kind of fine. You can’t find the sieve, well, you’ve been meaning to buy an extra, non-reactive one anyway. Next, you can’t find the garden snips or the poultry shears or the tin opener and you find yourself cutting flowers with poultry shears and hacking into tins with the pointy end of snips or trying to joint a chicken with a tin opener. And before you know it, you have taken out a new mortgage to buy a whole new set of stacking Tupperware and in the course of trying to figure out how to fit it into the drawers, ta-da! You find the sieve with the storage lids and the tin opener and the shears and everything else, all in the cupboard with the baking trays.
So no, it’s not that I like mess. But I do like life. When I walk into a totally clear kitchen that looks like a show kitchen, with blank, virgin surfaces, yes, I breathe more freely. And then I wonder, is anyone actually alive in this house? Does anyone get out all the coffee gubbins and decide that drinking it while it is hot is more important than putting it away? Or that in order to understand what is going on in the world, maybe you have to spread the whole paper out over the table and also some of the floor and that it might be there All Day because there is a lot to take in right now. And in the meantime, you will probably want to make more coffee and perhaps another piece of toast would see you through the shitshow that Trump is making of the world.
Then you notice you haven’t labelled the jars of chutney you made from the windfall apples yesterday so that involves getting out all the pens from the drawer-of-crap to label them. And probably you put them away again because your intentions are pure. And then you happen to see that 1Across of the crossword must be ‘Tunisia’, you got it! you actually got it! and so now you get out all those pens again because you already can’t remember which ones work, so frankly they can stay out on the counter for now. And before you know it, the chutney is also still on the counter, and the masking tape and the snips and the shears and all the pens you own and the whole of the paper (spread out) and the coffee and the butter and the Tupperware. And it’s 9.13am.
By the way, do I take sole responsibility for this. I do not! Did I make the chutney just for me? Or dry the apples into rings or make a chicken pie for lunch or turn the leftover beetroot into soup Just For Me? Was I the only person to read the paper or drink coffee or eat toast? No, reader, I was not. I was not even the last to make toast and I do not even eat marmalade or peanut butter (currently lid off, also on the counter). In fact, I was the only person in this kitchen to put my mug and toast plate into the dishwasher. But did I say anything? I did not. Was it my responsibility to wash up the chicken pie dish because I made the chicken pie? Did we all not gorge on the chicken pie? Just saying.
(Here’s the chicken pie before the gorging. Apart from the top right hand corner when I had to check the pastry as it came out of the oven. For professional reasons.)