After my grandmother died a few years ago, we couldn’t bring ourselves to get rid of most of her possessions. What had started as a storage room at my parents’ house quickly morphed into a living, breathing pile. It gradually invaded the spare bedroom and was making encroachments into my mother’s study. Answering the call of nature at night became fraught with terror, lest the pile had become sentient and would drag me into its clutches in the small hours of the morning. It was like living in a cross between Storage Wars and a Stephen King novel.
There was a whole box devoted to Diana and Charles plates and Andrew and Fergie engagement mugs
I’ve never been one for minimalism. The act of decluttering has always struck me as futile, an attempt to impose order on an essentially chaotic world. Still, you don’t have to be Marie Kondo to see that interventions are necessary when a room becomes so cluttered that it can no longer be walked through or used for its intended purpose. With a new niece in the family, and hopes of creating a nursery space amid the dust, I decided to tackle the pile before it claimed the entire house.
It was like unsealing a time capsule, an Augean Stables of Blair’s Britain. A Jar Jar Binks figurine lay next to a plastic model of the Millennium Dome. In the study, I discovered copies of The Spectator from the Iraq War and saw Tim Henman beaming through copies of Ace magazine, a now-defunct tennis monthly. My family seems to have an alarming penchant for royal memorabilia – but apparently only from ill-fated marriages. So there was no sign of Edward and Sophie or William and Kate but a whole box devoted to commemorative Diana and Charles plates and – horror of horrors – Andrew and Fergie engagement mugs. It is almost tempting to tend to the latter with a sharpie and place a neat black square over the happy couple’s eyes, given that’s the context in which we’re most used to seeing them now.
Some discoveries triggered guilt. My grandmother could knit beautifully and left behind vast quantities of sewing equipment and dress patterns. But given that few of our sewing skills now stretch to more than a simple mending job, it was hard to justify keeping it all. Still, you declutter, in part, in the hope of making new memories. Grandma, who abhorred fuss of all kinds, wouldn’t have wanted a whole room to become a shrine to her memory.
It’s worth persisting for the treasures languishing amid the junk: pretty vases, family diaries, mementoes. Best of all, our childhood books. Gathering dust in a bookcase buried under several broken suitcases, we found long-forgotten favourites. Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet by E. Nesbit, and Ian Serraillier’s masterpiece The Silver Sword – with luck, it can be the beginning of a library for the next generation.
We tackled the kitchen, playing a game called ‘Guess which prime minister was in No. 10 when these went out of date?’. Lurking near some Theresa May-era custard creams, the clear winner was a bag of pearl barley circa Gordon Brown.
Clearing two cabinets’ worth of videotapes triggered a cascade of memories. I’d forgotten all about the business of taping (and taping over) things before the advent of Sky Plus and Amazon Prime. Younger millennials and Gen Zs probably can’t remember this at all. It brought back vividly my dad’s howls of rage when his recording of the PGA Tour golf final turned into an episode of Gladiators or Supermarket Sweep. I felt a bittersweet pang as Bedknobs and Broomsticks and our James Bond VHS collection went the way of all flesh, even though, rationally, this response made no sense: we don’t have a working video-player.
However welcome the long vistas of hard-won new space, decluttering invariably inflicts small tragedies on its victims. My mother’s first comment on seeing her newly accessible study was to wonder what on earth had become of her fax machine.
Decluttering is much needed too in our ancient institutions, and nowhere is this truer than the dear old Church of England, in which I have to declare an interest since I’m married to a clergyman.
The C of E is under a sort of Babylonian captivity by the lanyard class. Central communication occurs in a patois forged from perma-jargon. We must hope that the new Archbishop of Canterbury can shed the hangover of the Justin Welby days, and begin to speak with a bit more clarity.
Sarah Mullally’s early attempts, however, don’t bode well. There’s an almost performative ugliness to how her arrival at the highest office has been communicated. Much is being made of her being ‘installed’ next month, rather than ‘enthroned’, which makes her sound like BT Broadband rather than a successor to Augustine. She has described the Church’s unpopular reparations plan as a ‘gospel imperative’. (Must have missed the bit in the Synoptics where Jesus falls for an obvious swindle to the detriment of those trying to follow him.) Her addresses so far have been filled with predictable progressive button presses which might have come from any council leader or permanent secretary.
There has been plenty written about the rumours of religious revival and the stirrings of those seeking spiritual guidance once more. They won’t tarry long at the C of E’s door if what they get when they knock sounds like the holding message at a GP’s surgery or a hectoring by a substandard PSHE teacher.
So, Archbishop Sarah, please speak to us of mystery, of beauty and of grace. Of the things of God, not of the civil service, NHS or BBC. The nation which you aspire to serve cries out for the bread of re-enchantment. Please don’t continue to give it meaningless ‘values’-speak – for that is a worn and ugly stone.
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