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Making Room for the New

31/1/2016

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I wrote a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) blog recently about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, a simple, effective way to banish clutter forever by Marie Kondo (see Wrong Twice). I admit that I found the book a little bit of an ordeal to read, and I joked in my blog that the good thing about its lengthy title was that, being a slim book, there wasn’t that much more to get through! However, joking aside, it has proven to be an immensely practical aid to de-cluttering.

We decided that the most sensible (and sane) approach was for us to make a slow tactical ascent of Clutter Mountain by tackling it in stages. We pencilled into our diaries a series of weekend dates over the end of 2015 and early part of 2016 - aiming to tackle at least one of the categories Kondo describes in her book every third week (practical for us). First we took on Clothes, then Books, and our most recent session was with Papers. I foolishly thought this particular category would prove to be a doddle - but five solid hours later, after producing a heap of papers beside our shredder reminiscent of the Nixon White House, I thought differently! We still hadn’t quite completed the task by the time we deemed it necessary to stop for the day, the plan is to finish off with a few hour-long sessions over the next week. All this stuff, I hasten to point out, was all very easily identified as thoroughly unimportant, or totally redundant and of no significance to either our present or future lives. Frankly, it is hard to credit the amount of junk that accumulates around us over time. Clutter had taken on the persona of a curmudgeonly old miser that had insidiously built a little kingdom for itself around the periphery of our lives and was threatening to take us hostage. It had to be shown the door!

The ‘fumigation’ process still has a few months left to run, however, I think it safe to say, eviction orders have definitely been served and the clean-up is underway. What’s really remarkable is how much lighter and brighter the house feels, and despite having toted about half a dozen sacks of clothes and about twenty large boxes of books to charity shops, we still have clothes to wear and books to read - but only the things we actually like wearing and books we either love, plan to read, read again, or simply want to keep for reference etc.

So, basically, if the idea takes your fancy and you too would like to try this approach, take heart from my assurance that the baby doesn’t have to be thrown out with the proverbial bathwater!

I’d love to hear from anyone who has de-cluttered in this way, or pursued an alternative method. 


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Little Tales

17/1/2016

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This week I’ve been reading Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith, a collection of vignettes, about the type of person it’s easy to dislike. These little fables, often very brief, take on a different character study e.g. The Victim, The Evangelist, The Mobile Bed-Object, The Prude, The Middle-Class Housewife etc. and each in turn is subjected to Highsmith’s unique, acerbic and archly wicked eye. A lot has been written about Highsmith’s misanthropic nature, even her friends seem to have found her difficult and spiky a lot of the time, but I couldn’t honestly comment on whether these tales in any way reflect her own (reputed) hatred of her own sex; personally, I think Highsmith is simply having a lot of fun with this collection. The tales almost invariably end badly, are often a little bit sneaky, unkind, unpleasant or downright nasty - they are also (at all times), hugely entertaining and great fun. I suspect Highsmith wrote these stories, as the title itself suggests to me, with her tongue very firmly fixed on the inside of her cheek. I read them, as I believe they were written - to be enjoyed. And so I did.

Next week, starting tomorrow, I am very pleased to say it’s Buddy Reading time again! It’s an untitled, non-exclusive club that is open to anyone. We read no more than two books a year together, which makes the exercise a pleasure rather than a pain. No genre is excluded, and so far the only plan appears to be taking on a book one of us suggests that hasn’t been read by anyone else. This time we are reading an Australian classic, The Harp in the South by Ruth Park. It’s the second book in a trilogy of the same title, however, it was the book she actually wrote first. Park completed the first part of the trilogy, Missus, almost forty years later. Some of us have taken the time to read Missus first and others, like myself, plan to read the books in the order they were written. I am really looking forward to discovering a writer (slightly ashamed to admit this) that I had previously never heard of; in fact, it’s my intention to rectify my woefully poor knowledge of Antipodean writers.

Pick up a copy of Harp in the South, send me a message and when you’ve completed the book leave any comments you have either on Amazon or Goodreads or on your blog (if you have one) and send us the link, or, better still, join us on Twitter - myself and the other Buddy Readers will very much enjoy hearing your views. Believe me, it’s a surprisingly painless way of finding good reading.

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Careless Talk ...

10/1/2016

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As mentioned before (see How I came to Traditional English Folk via Abba) it can be a dangerous thing to voice a preference in my house. This Christmas I received a pile of Patricia Highsmith books - I read her Ripley stories last year as well as her classic first novel, the psychological thriller Strangers on a Train. All it  would have required from me were the words “I really like ...” and Judith would have ear-marked them for her pressie drawer. Fortunately for me, I probably completed the above sentence with words along the lines of “(I really like) and admire the way Patricia Highsmith writes,” rather than “(I really like) the artwork - it’s the best thing about her books!” So, lots of great reading for me to look forward to in 2016. I already own a (tragically small) cache of the Charles Portis titles I haven’t read yet - I eke my Portis out because he’s a favourite writer, and as a novelist he hasn’t been very prolific (although he may still surprise us, of course!) - maybe I’ll pick up one of the new ones and re-read an old favourite this year. Yippee!

A funny thing happened this Christmas - the first time in all the Christmasses Judith and I have spent together : we gave each other the same present. It was a DVD of The Seventh Cross (1944) starring Spencer Tracy. It’s a bit difficult to get a copy of it in the UK, and I’d always wanted to see it again having caught it only once on the TV as a boy in Wales. It’s set in pre World War Two Germany, with the Nazis in power, where an atmosphere of fear exists. It’s easy to understand why we thought to give each other this film, as we did a Christmas market trip in mid-December to Dortmund in Germany, where we visited a former Gestapo prison, now a museum which bears testimony to those who opposed the Nazis and their despicable ideology. The film tells this story too, and is perhaps an unusual example of a wartime propaganda movie because many of the Germans are portrayed sympathetically and not simply as stereotypical bad guys. For my money, Spencer Tracy is always worth watching. The museum in Dortmund was excellent and my wife Judith has written a very interesting piece about it on her own blog, take a look Winterreise to Dortmund .

So, here we are, the Christmas/New Year shenanigans are behind us once again and most of us have, I expect, settled back into daily life. I’m back writing, working on the last chapters (second draft) of the follow-on book to Niedermayer & Hart. One nice thing about writing a second draft, in contrast to a first, is the certainty that you actually do have a book.

Pip Pip!

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Happy 2016!

1/1/2016

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I stopped making New Year resolutions many years ago.  I admit that I’ve had a number of bad habits in the past that were regularly marked down, destined to become ‘has beens’ in the forthcoming New Year - sometimes my iron resolve lasted days, weeks even, but generally I was lucky if I made it til midday on 1st Jan. So much for those determined declarations of intent!

On reflection, my most destructive habits (e.g. smoking) are now happily consigned to the past.  Even so, I still cautiously avoid getting physically too close while anyone’s actively smoking and even find myself holding my breath as I walk past them. I would hate to become ‘hooked’ again and know full well that it would only require me to listen to the delusion that ‘one little cigarette would do me no harm’ to be led astray. I always feel sad to see young people smoking, but understand that they wouldn’t appreciate me pointing out the dangers of smoking to them.

So, no specific New Year resolutions. However, I do have a number of wishes I’d love to see come to fruition:

I’d like to live in a more equal society where the gap between the richest and the poorest people in my own country and on this planet is dramatically reduced. I don’t think the answer to this is quite as simple as just taking all their money off the rich - a truly fair and just world requires all of us to play a part.

I’d like to see some genuine consensus between our leaders on environmental issues. So far we’ve only witnessed lip-service and a good deal of hot air - we live together on one planet, and it behoves us all to take more care of it. Our politicians are all too often vain, complacent and slippery and must be held to account, which demands more effort from individuals like you and me - politicians will only pay attention if we make them listen.

I’d like to live in a world where peace prevails and where differences are aired around a table. Most human conflict ultimately concludes in this way, so what a shame we find the inevitable solution so unthinkable at the beginning. The cost of intransigence is invariably great suffering and too often means the loss of many innocent lives. I’d dearly love to see the world’s arms dealers go out of business. Harry Patch (1898 - 2009), last surviving British soldier who fought in World War One, put it very powerfully when he asked: “Why did we fight? The peace was settled round a table, so why the hell couldn’t they do that at the start, without losing millions of men?”

Unless every human being on this planet has a profound change of heart, it’s hard to imagine these wishes coming true in 2016, in my lifetime, or even within the lifetime of my beautiful new grand-daughter - or even that of her own grand-daughter. Yet, these remain my wishes for this and for every New Year.

And I do truly believe that change begins with me.

In 1987 my wife and I moved out of London to a village in Sussex. I told the man who owned our little grocery store that the reason we didn’t buy his eggs was because they weren’t free-range. The following week he got some in for a try-out. Guess what? His egg sales actually increased. Thirty years on it’s hard to imagine a time when free-range eggs were not widely available. Likewise, when Mrs Thatcher refused to impose sanctions upon the South African Government and its loathsome apartheid system, thousands and thousands of people in Britain and Ireland boycotted South African products e.g. fruit. I believe this action on the part of many individuals made a real difference; justice finally prevailed, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the rest is history. One young woman in Ireland and her union colleagues spent two and a half years on strike pay after refusing to sell Outspan grapefruit at her checkout.

Like I said, I believe change begins with me. The American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead put it like this: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Let’s all do our best to make it a healthy, peaceful and happy 2016 for all!

Links:
Irish anti-apartheid movement:
http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/an-boks-amach-the-irish-anti-apartheid-movement/
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