Published Messenger Newspapers, Adelaide, Wednesday, June 5, 2002
MINIMALISM FOR DUMMIES
A FRIEND dropped by the other day to ask if she could use my spare room to practise her singing and, fair exchange, I asked would she mind dusting between the do-ray-mees? A clean flat for a few flat notes. Having sung Panis Angelicus and Glocca Morra over and over, she finally emerged for water and, asking her how the dusting was going, she said it was not possible to dust and sing at the same time. I showed her the door and she said: ``Why don't you just get a cleaner?'' Hey, my mother, although she hated vacuuming, never paid anyone to come in and clean her house and, dammit, neither will I! I never heard her say ``Cleanliness is next to Godliness'' but mum gave me the impression that God frowned on those who did not keep their houses in good order themselves. Eternal glory awaits the penitent duster. In my case, cleaning is not the problem so much as the clutter. Minimalist decor defeats me. Show me a solitary table and a corner lamp in a vast area of empty floorspace, and I keep asking myself where-o-where do they keep their junk? The situation is so bad at home the available living space keeps decreasing and the accumulated mess seems to have reached critical mass where it no longer requires any contribution from me or even my presence to continue expanding. The ironing board cannot be left standing by itself for a few hours without returning to find it covered in newspapers and magazines. Determined to fix the problem once and for all, I recently drove all the way to the IKEA store in Melbourne and paid $680 for DIY shelving units, wheeled them outside on a trolley, found they would not fit in the car and, cursing mightily, wheeled them back inside. IKEA offered to deliver them to Adelaide for $200. ``Wouldn't it be cheaper to just open a store there?'' I suggested, to which they said: ``You want to buy the Adelaide franchise?'' And all I wanted was some shelving. In the circumstances, no wonder my eye fell upon the latest Inside Out magazine, promising ``Well-Behaved Bedrooms'' and sagely noting: ``Wardrobes attract clutter like a mailbox attracts junk mail.'' How true. I place a brick inside my letterbox at weekends, when most of the rubbish arrives, to prevent the deliverers getting the flap open. It works surprisingly well. Among Inside Out's other Zen-like pearls: ``Life is too short to keep knickers, bras and the like in an orderly fashion.'' Couldn't agree more. It also had tips on how to accommodate an ``obsession with turtlenecks and stilletos''. They know me so well. One idea I did like was to use secondhand dressmaker's dummies, at $77 apiece, to draping clothes on. You could fill whole rooms, like having friends around for party dressups, and never have to wine and dine them. In the spare room, one unpacked box remains from the last time I moved. It contains stuff that I obviously do not need such as broken keyboards and cracked refrigerator shelves, and should be tossed away. Then again, you just never know...
