Marital HQ is testament to the magnetic power of tat. I’m genetically doomed to pick and hoard thanks to packrat parents who were upcycling and rejigging and making windchimes out of cutlery long before there was medication and reality shows for that kind of thing. Back when I was a mere gosling, they thought nothing of wading the poisonous Torrens River mudflats to salvage a leaf-sprung Ripper-era perambulator when, as part of a notorious serial killer investigation, the council conveniently drained our half-arsed waterway. I can’t imagine what villainy brought the buggy to rest in that noxious mire – one prays without a bawling tot inside – but gussied up it became a fancy hallway table where they still keep a brace of souvenir teaspoons, a selection of Matchbox emergency vehicles and possibly the world’s last faux woodgrain answerphone.
The folks were starving art teachers, most likely because they spent all their pennies on worthless gimcrack and the entrance fee to the tip every weekend. They winnowed beaches for seaglass, curated a sprawling collection of war-era surgical instruments, and wallpapered our whole house with the front covers of 750 Time magazines. During the Cold War, I learned about Vietnam and Watergate over Vegemite sandwiches in our red-quared dining room.
My canny olds weren’t above putting us offspring to good use when they needed extra rummaging time. I was the angelic stool pigeon with the wheaten curls who glamoured the formidable junkyard matron while they poked after-hours for bootscrapers and biscuit tins and “interesting” whisks. One man’s crap is another man’s upcycled wet bar with sugar muzzler and swizzle-stick hutch after all.
Which explains the life-size polystyrene bear head, cat ear muffs, the statue of Chairman Mao waving at a plastic tomato and a wind-up elk, all of whom reside on my BodeSide kitschen shelf. And I’m an equal-opportunity crap collector, so you don’t have to be a glamorous minke foreskin or an exotic pirate leg to get a guernsey on my mantelpiece. I have plenty guernsies. Ditto socks. There’s swarms of them nesting in my armoire, still in packets. If anybody wants any, give me a bell. Some cat T-shirts from Olympic that never fit me and never will. Souvenir mugs? I’m up to my chopstick collection in them. I got sneakers coming out me arse.
So it’s all very odd that I’ve started to question my stuff. Until recently the thought of the National Highway 1 salvage yards made the hairs stand up on my neck. There was almost nothing better than breezing across the river at Chbar Ampoev with a wallet full of Washingtons, a fresh pair of orthotics in my scavenging sneakers and a handy packet of post-ferret moist towelettes. Or so I believed.
Perhaps the years of CharmingVille’s passing monkery have osmotically, ascetically entered the op shop of my id. Maybe it’s the weather that makes you want to get nekkid on your insides as well as your outsides. Whatever new broom I’ve unconsciously brushed up against, the light bulb has clicked on in my slightly musty attic, and boy is it chockers up there.
Even before Santa had a chance to offload his superfluous bounty down my metaphorical chimney this tropical Yule, I felt the need to unstuff, and decided 2015 will be the year I ‘live simple’. In my first act of metaphysical declutteration, I resisted the urge to embellish those two words with a cod-clever full stop in between, artfully design them into a faux handwritten motto board, and then post it on Pinterest. Instead, I went down the Panda Mart for some big black garbage bags.
Poor Hubster. My arbitrary and zealous divestment of 20 things per day has caught him off guard. Yesterday he went looking for 1) His acrylic beetle key-ring, 2) his photo with waxwork Obama and 3) an out-of-date packet of cauliflower seeds from Kew Gardens three years ago. It didn’t go well.
Just today, even before the chicken-in-the-egg man started his trawl up our sleepy street this bright am, I was arse-up fossicking in our sideboard and exorcising all its dusty constituents like a woman possessed: three uncracked Khmer-English Dictionaries, six years’ worth of Door 2 Doors, eight strings of those really uncomfortable earphones, an inexplicable golf ball, and the Bunster-bit remains of a 2007 Ikea catalogue. It was hard to let the first millstone go, but by the time Hubster had thrown on a krama and come out to see what all the fucking noise was about, I’d chucked out a whole box of junk and a bit of baggage with it. Perhaps it’s just pudding-fuelled OCD, but I’m looking for some New Year’s extra-sharp resolution once the dawn-crack thing-flinging is over. Hope you find what you’re looking for, too. Cheers!