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Letter
After Christmas is spring-cleaning time for shopkeepers. It is of course lovely
when the shop is full of people and the phone
rings non-stop, but we are very much enjoying
the chance to chat, listen to Classic FM (except
for the chat) and Radio 3 (except for the modern
and choral music), sort things out (which bookmarks
need reprinting?), saunter off to Konditor and
Cook to buy a treat – and tidy up.
Two recent books have made us stop and think
about the virtues, or not, of tidying-up. The
first is A
Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder,
which argues that being untidy has hidden benefits
since tidying is time-consuming and may not save
time in the end; disorder allows room for coincidence,
serendipity and new discoveries (Fleming only
discovered penicillin because he did not clean
a petri dish and thus allowed fungal spores to
get to work on bacteria); and procrastination
makes sense because leaving things to the last
minute reduces the risk of wasting time on things
that turn out to be unimportant.
And it is cheering to discover that, as we had
always suspected, disorder and creativity are
linked. This is one of the topics covered in Tom
Hodgkinson’s How
to Be Free, a provocative book which
exhorts us to abandon what might loosely be called
the rat-race and take up baking bread, growing
vegetables, bicycling, giving up shopping and
being happy. The chapter titles range from ‘Stop
Competing’ and ‘Say No to Guilt and
Free Your Spirit’ to ‘Stop Worrying
about Your Pension and Get a Life’ and ‘Live
Free of the Supermarkets’. One of my favourites
is ‘The Reign of the Ugly is Over’:
‘We have a duty to Beauty’ Tom Hodgkinson
says, and should bring it into the home with ‘a
pot of geraniums on the windowsill. A Pelican
paperback’ and so on (From which we have
to conclude that he has never seen a Persephone
book, but don’t worry, he will, he will…)
His book was on my mind during the recent Persephone
Book Group. (Do try and join the dozen or so Persephone
readers who, once a month, drink madeira, eat
bread and cheese, and talk about a book.) Last
week it was The
Home-Maker, which begins with a description
of Evangeline so obsessed with cooking the perfect
meal, keeping the house spotless and driving her
husband to work harder, that she fails to have
time for any interests of her own or for her children
or husband’s happiness. I could not help
wondering what she would have said if Tom Hodgkinson
had said to her ‘Say No to Guilt and Free
Your Spirit’ or ‘No More Housework,
or the Power of the Candle.’ (The theme
of The
Home-Maker is, of course, that Evangeline
is a neurotic housewife who loathes being at home;
she is freed from the tyranny of housework when
she and her husband ‘role-swap’; and
at last the children can breathe.)
The discussion raised some interesting issues
about being tidy and whether we mind if the house
is a mess, some of us shrugging our shoulders
and saying ‘je m’en fiche’
and some of us being very troubled by untidiness,
for, in the words of A Perfect Mess,
‘most people still shun disorder, or suffer
guilt over the mess they can't avoid.’ This
is an issue which comes up as well in Rachel Cusk’s
excellent new novel Arlington
Park a very, very funny book, written
with unusual insight and brilliance, about suburban
housewives – some of whom have nothing else
to do with their lives except keep their houses
soullessly neat.
As an antidote may we suggest that you go to
the Dennis
Severs House if you have never been before.
It is gloriously messy, and gives an incredible
picture of how real people lived real lives in
eighteenth century Spitalfields.
And finally, do read this article by Rachel Johnson
in The
Times in response to the recent report
that men still rule the boardroom: ‘If the
majority of women seem quite content not to be
top dog at the office as well as top dog at home,
it’s likely to be because – now here’s
a wild, crazy thought – they don’t
want to be.’ Discuss, with The
Home-Maker and How to be Free
as supporting texts… And since this is the
theme of one of our spring novels, House-Bound,
this is a topic to which we will return.
Nicola Beauman
15 January 2007
Lamb’s Conduit Street | 
