Tidying up is bad for your health

 

Visitors often say that my house always looks tidy. I’m not really in a position to judge, but since sons #1 and #2 more or less vacated the premises, I see a small improvement, and also a corresponding lapse in standards when they reappear.  Then there’s the odd (very regular) occasion when the cat brings in a mouse and leaves the bits he doesn’t like at the side of his plate. Only the cat believes that the hall carpet is the side of his plate, so owing to his lack of opposable thumbs or human emotion, I spend a disproportionate amount of time with the Vanish and a cloth, scrubbing at the stains and muttering expletives under my breath.

Visitors, of course, are blissfully unaware that they only have to open a drawer or cupboard to unleash a veritable explosion of clothes, household objects and assorted haberdashery which has been hidden away in order to preserve the veneer of tidiness. I do try to keep things tidy, even when they’re hidden away, but sometimes I just take the lazy option and stuff them into any available space in the spirit of “out of sight, out of mind”. And “out of mind” is usually fine until I start looking for things.

Take last summer, for example. I came back from a couple of months in France to discover that a whole stack of important documents seemed to have disappeared. I didn’t actually blame anyone else, but nor was I prepared to shoulder the responsibility knowing, as I did, that even in my most stupid of moments I wouldn’t have thrown them out. They included my Premium Bond Certificates and the paperwork for a savings account. After giving it a month to see whether they turned up (as stuff usually does, eventually) I gave up and rang the institutions concerned to get copies. So imagine my surprise when I discovered, some 3 or 4 months down the line,  that I had carefully filed them in a new file which had been sitting on the shelf all along. 

And that’s my problem. Over the past couple of months, I have noticed that my ability to lose things has increased exponentially, and my ability to find them has diminished in equal measure. Yet I swear, I put them away with care and some thought. However, my ability to find where I did put stuff has turned into a pastiche of that famous Mastermind sketch by the Two Ronnies where Ronnie Corbett is answering the question prior to the one he’s currently being asked. Allow me to explain..

A few weeks back, I hunted high and low for the installation CD for my printer, as I needed to install it on another computer. It was nowhere to be found, but I did manage to come across the cat’s vaccination record. When, a few weeks previously, I realised I’d lost the cat’s vaccination record , it was nowhere to be found, but I did track down the registration document for my car, the search for which I’d put on hold.  When THAT search was in full swing was when I found the missing Premium Bond certificates…

I am seriously considering beginning the search for a suitable home for the bewildered.