I went to see a friend today. She lives in one of those kinds of open plan wooden floored loft conversions where its easy to envisage friends turning up for impromptu Sunday brunches or unforced weekday dinner parties. A jazz CD softly emanated from acoustically satisfying speakers and she handed me a glass of perfectly chilled wine perfectly from her no doubt well-stocked fridge. In short she had the kind of casually cool and relaxed place I have always longed to achieve. I was silently admiring her pad when she apologised profusely and sincerely about the filthy state of her bathroom.
And that’s just it. Even if you manage to buy the perfectly decorated and accordingly price tagged article, the pretence of home perfection seems definitely more fur coat than knickers. For example, there are definitely parts of our house that I wouldn’t mind anyone seeing. This week I am glorying in a cornucopia of tulips that my sister sent me and which are spilling from vases in my bedroom flanking my new mirror. Yet like my friend and her less than spotless bathroom, there are always things that I am red faced even to admit to myself are as they are. Such as the currently Aegean problem of two cats who are moulting. Tumbleweed balls of fluff breeze across the laminate floor collecting dust and seem as some kind of precursor primordial soup preparing to evolve into life of its own. Vigorous vacuuming just about deals with it but fails to deter an almost daily reformation of a furry plimsoll line across the front of the sofa. Just when I think I’ve cleaned up the lot I see great gouts of fur drifting gently in the air above me. Finally the mess is under control and I can turn my attention to what has in the meantime been neglected elsewhere.
This is just the way our house is. Feast or famine. Parts of it gleam and welcome you to unwind and just get on with whatever you feel like doing. Others glare at you from behind a morass of untidy cables and discarded magazines. Some projects like the kitchen are almost complete and admired wistfully by those who’ve not yet started on theirs, whilst the undecorated storage state of certain rooms are a definite no go areas for visitors. There is simply no point in me even looking at things like table throws until the dining-room has been restored from the previous owners grandiose orange and gold takeaway colour-scheme and the oak dining table my OH insists cannot be replaced by anything from IKEA refurbished. I can’t pretend that that room is anything less than an embarrassment and after a quick dust of the accessible bits I firmly shut the door on it until we have the time – and inclination – to deal with redecorating. After starting out trying to achieve the illusion of a perfectly clean and organised existence I’m trying instead to settle for a kind of routine where the most important things get done early in the week and whatever I have time for later gets done or not. I wonder though if there really are people whose homes upon close scrutiny still resemble those whose images surround us in the magazines and on TV? I hope not.
