How To Organise Your Life

Part 7

I decided immediately that I would never become a thrall to rituals of domesticity.

In my childhood I had seen these engulf half my mother’s life. Sitting on the floor watching her take from a bookcase and dust every single one of the works of Bulwer Lytton, I said, “I shouldn’t do all that”. She replied, “I know you wouldn’t. That’s why I must”.

Perhaps because of such memories as this, squalor rapidly became my natural setting. I felt it was only by a series of unfortunate accidents that till now I had always lived in the captivity of hygiene. Nancy Spain had not yet become one of the sages of the air and had therefore not had the opportunity to promulgate her first law - only a fool would make the bed every day - but this was one of the truths that I knew by instinct. As soon as I began the unfurnished life, I practised sleeping on my back as if I were in my coffin. Except for the thickening film of sullied cold cream that as time went by piled up on the pillow-slip, no one would have been able to detect that my bed had been occupied. I changed the bed linen once a week. I realized that if I did not, I would one day reach a point of no return beyond which the laundry would refuse to accept my dim grey sheets. This Augustinian state of affairs was acceptable when I slept alone but it would no longer do once I was not sure that this would always be so. About cleaning the rest of the room I did nothing at all. Except that after a while it became necessary to jump in the air while putting on my trousers so as to avoid trailing them in the dust, I never found that this omission brought in its filthy wake any disadvantages whatsoever. As the years went whizzing by, I was able to formulate a companion law to Miss Spain’s. Mine stated that there was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.

The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp

Organising your home is a relatively easy matter if you live alone and/or have complete control over that home, that living space. Keeping your home organised is also relatively easy. (“Relatively” because here we’re ignoring all other pitfalls and blocks in the organisation process.) However, despite the rising statistics (one-fifth of the population of the UK apparently live alone), most of us live at least part of our lives with other people. We share rooms, flats or houses, when we’re young, free and single, we go on sharing sometimes even when we’re in a partnership due to financial considerations, and we share of course with that partner and later sometimes with children and other dependents. From the first early, heady days of arguing over whose turn it is to buy household necessities (milk, bread, toilet rolls) or to clean the ‘common parts’ (a legalese phrase which always fills me with Crispian delight) through perhaps to wrangling with adolescents over the state of their washing or their bedrooms, clashes over organising the home by the livers-in of that home are one of the great recurring trials of life.

It goes deep: if you feel that life can only be lived in tranquillity when a home is reasonably well-ordered, with bread in the breadbin, washing in the laundry basket and dust in the vacuum cleaner, do you have the right to impose this sense of order on a fellow home-sharer like Mr Crisp (heaven help you…)? Contrariwise, does Mr Crisp have the right to foul your living space with his dust, his hair cream and his sparingly-washed linen?

Obviously, the answer to living with someone whose standards of house-keeping differ radically from your own is to move out and live with someone else whose standards are more aligned with yours, or to live on your own. (Compromise, in this area, does not lead to comfort.)

However - if the people with whom you live are related to you (by marriage or consanguinity, for example), moving out may not be an option. Divorce is expensive and dependent offspring (however acquired) tend to cling about the person. So, sadly, compromise or a change of tactic is the only option at this life stage.

The first step to tackling any problem (or ‘issue’ as the current idiom has it) is to realise its extent. So, as it’s Christmas and/or holiday time, and as those with whom you live are at some point perhaps likely to have some time on their hands in which this vital issue can be broached, here is a quiz.

Scoring is boring, so the answers in this quiz are easy to score and the winner is, simply, the one who has gained the most points at the end of the game. Each answer, or addition to or elaboration on an answer also scores a point. Scores may be kept with a pen and paper, pencil and paper, tablet, abacus, smartphone, spreadsheet - anything but in the participants’ heads. (This is the season of goodwill, after all.) Children of any age, but particularly adolescents, may take part and there is no upper age limit. Only if you live alone, and never invite anyone to your home for social reasons, are you ineligible to participate (or excused from participating).

If you are an organised person and/or you are good at organising games such as this, and if you are going to be somewhere other than in the home in question when this quiz takes place, you might want to take relevant photographs in advance to be produced in evidence.

The Quiz

1. What colour is the vacuum cleaner? [Extra points maybe gained for additional observation such as the procedure for emptying the vacuum cleaner and where the vacuum cleaner is located]

2. What brand of washing-up liquid is currently being used in the house? [Extra points can be earned by providing details of the procedure for washing up, for example how the dishwasher is filled, which items need soaking, etc.]

3. A large and fragile glass vase which needs to be sent to someone for Christmas has just arrived in the post; explain how you will wrap and pack it up to send on to the recipient, using only packing materials, wrapping paper, ribbon, tape, string etc. stored in the house. [Extra points can be gained by knowing where weighing scales and postage stamps etc. are located (or indeed for being the person in the home who provided them…)]

4. It is freezing outside and there is a leak in the plumbing so the plumber has arrived to fix it. Unfortunately he has had to come straight from a Christmas party and so doesn’t have his tools with him (he is also dressed as a female Father Christmas but you are sufficiently well-bred to take no notice of this, and anyway plumbers are hard to come by at the best of times). He needs an adjustable wrench, a large cross-head screwdriver, some electrical tape, a protective waterproof sheet, a protective cloth sheet, six cloths which can be thrown away after the job is done, two plastic bags large enough to cover his size 10 feet (he is a very considerate plumber), and a cup of very strong coffee with cream and brown sugar (this last should actually have come very much first). [The first person to detail where all these items can be found in the house is, exceptionally, to be given five extra points]

5. The plumber has gone and has effected a temporary repair. However the problem has turned out to be the boiler which needs an esoteric part which the plumber has kindly written down for you. Is the boiler still under guarantee? From where was the boiler purchased? Where is the receipt?

6. Who last:

cleaned the toilet(s)?
vacuumed under the bed(s)?
took out the rubbish for the weekly/fortnightly/whenever-the-Council-can-manage-to-finance-it-after-paying-for-their-last-corporate-jolly refuse collection?
checked the washing machine filter (or vacuum cleaner filter)? [Exceptionally here five points are to be deducted from anyone saying: “I didn’t even know they had filters”]
ran a service wash on the washing machine?
descaled the shower head ?
sorted out the miscellany drawer in the kitchen?
checked that all the boots, coats, old shoes etc. in the area where everyone puts them were all still extant?
arranged that the boiler which has just broken down was serviced?

What you have here is a stub, an embryo, the germ of a quiz. You can now continue it, grow it, tweak it, make it your own, for your household’s - and your own - ends.

This game has no ending (unless it be tears and recriminations) but the goal is to make a point. If you are the one who carries the large and heavy burden of organising life in the home then, unless you are a masochist or similar, you will want to lighten that burden.

You might also want revenge.

Part 1 — http://tinyurl.com/k8e4jv6
Part 2 — http://tinyurl.com/k2qtplb
Part 3 — http://tinyurl.com/lndykl3
Part 4 — http://tinyurl.com/ohdgs7t
Part 5 — http://tinyurl.com/lqlbc29
Part 6 — http://tinyurl.com/lgt8w8k

Twitter: @MaryonJeane