On Magical Tidying, Or: Molly Vickers Wets Her Nickers

I'm currently reading Marie Kondo's book (which you may have heard of) about tidying up, largely because I recently bought a Kindle and I was looking for a few different things to load up before going on holidays.

Momentary digression to talk about eBook readers: 

I bought a Kindle partly to try this whole eBook reader thingy, and partly because I noticed a few books I was interested in reading were way cheaper and easier to obtain by Kindle than by traditional means (i.e., ordering it from the other side of the planet). However, I just remembered one of the reasons why I hadn't bought an eBook reader ages ago is the fact that I can't lend the books or give them away after reading them, and that sucks.

Back to rambling on about Kondo's book: 

So, this woman clearly has deep seated issues and probably should have had some sort of intervention when she was a child. She talks about how much "freedom" she had as a middle child, whose parents were busy looking after the youngest and whose brother completely ignored her to play video games, and how she used that freedom to develop an obsession for housewife magazines and form a life-long passion for tidying up - and yet spent most of her childhood and youth feeling that no matter how much she tidied, her room never seemed tidy enough.

Essentially, she's a person who was raised by Home Beautiful magazines and has developed a tidying mania as a way to exert some control over her life. And yet she's made a bucket load of money from her *ahem* "passion", so while she might be insane, she's certainly not crazy.

And that's how I'd some up her book really - insane, but not completely crazy. Reading her book is an interesting rollercoaster that goes a little something like this:

"This woman is nuts! Oh, actually, that's a really interesting idea. Nope, this is just loony. Oh, I can see how that would work. I should give that ago... aaand it just went seriously weird again."

For example, she suggests storing things vertically rather than in piles, because you can easily see what you have and how much you are accumulating. Interesting idea, and I could see how it would work. She suggests storing your laptop like it's an actual book - I hadn't thought of that before but I like it. And then she tells us she loves carrots to pieces and she stores them vertically in her fridge, keeping them in cup holders so they can stay upright.

Why? Why would you go out of your way to store carrots vertically? Why would you tell thousands of people that you store your carrots vertically? Surely this sort of thing is between you and your carrots?

I'm also concerned that there doesn't appear to be any kind of charity shop in Japan, because she spends a lot of time telling you to throw out clothes and books that don't "spark joy", but never once suggests donating items that are still in good condition to charity. It's straight into the bin bag, if you please. This seems strange, because surely it would be easier to let go of something that's "still good" if you knew someone else might appreciate it more than you?

Speaking of books, she clearly doesn't have the soul of a librarian or archivist. That's okay, not everyone does, but some people do and that's going to play havoc with her "if it doesn't spark joy, toss it out" approach to weeding your book collection or paperwork.

I used to be the kind of person who had to keep every book I've ever owned. When I moved to Tasmania, I took boxes and boxes of books with me - and left more at my family home because I couldn't part with them. And then I lumped them all back when I moved back to Queensland.

I'm getting better at this, and over the years I've weeded a lot of my collection. I'm planning another big cull shortly, where I'll be saying goodbye to quite a number of books that used to mean something to me, but don't belong to the person I am today.

We change a lot over the years, but we keep hold of things for older versions of ourselves because they meant something to us, once. But the truth is, we need to let go of what once mattered to us in order to have space in our lives for new things - or for nothing. Sometimes we need to simply take a break from having things and have a bit of free space for a while.

And yet I know there is one book I'll probably be keeping even though it doesn't "spark joy" and doesn't mean anything to me any more. I've tried to get rid of that book through several successive culls, but I keep fishing it out of the pile and putting it back in my bookcase.

It's called Voices: An Anthology of Poetry and Pictures, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield, and every time I look at it I wonder why I've kept it all these years. And then I remember. I've kept it because there's a poem in that book called "Child's Bouncing Song" written by Tony Connor.

This poem starts with the line "Molly Vickers wets her nickers" and the poem is burned into my brain for reasons I can't explain (we all have our childhood obsessions, mine was poetry - sadly I haven't worked out how to make a fortune out of that, yet). However, I keep stuffing up the two stanzas before the last one. I don't know why. All I know is, every few years or so I'll start reciting that poem in a moment of absent mindedness, and then I'll get to the point where I can't remember if the next line is "High and low and/ to and fro and/ down the street and up the hill" or "Mister, mister,/ Shirley's sister/ won a prize at Blackpool prom."

It will drive me nuts, until I find that blasted book and remind myself how the last half of that poem goes. So while the book doesn't "spark joy", and I'd happily part with it otherwise, I can't get rid of it.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "just photocopy that poem and keep it somewhere". Nice idea, but unfortunately my brain is now broken. Once upon a time I could "accidentally" memorise sections of poetry, and deliberately memorise passages the length of entire chapters. I can't do that any more - my brain elasticity has gone and lost its rebound. I can't remember where I move things to. I try to move them to a more logical place, but I may as well move them directly into a black hole.

So, maybe Konmari's method might actually work for that. A) have next to nothing in the first place, b) put everything in the same category together, so that you just need to go to the place where everything is and look for the scant few things that you still have.

Or, maybe I just need to leave Molly Vickers to dry off somewhere, and decide that I'm okay with never remembering the order of those two stanzas.

Book Reflection: Another Book About Bears.

Another Book About Bears, by Laura and Philip Bunting

It just so happens, when you’ve set yourself a mini-challenge of writing book reviews/reflections about books with bears in them, that you end up spending a lot of time talking about children’s books. Bears are very popular animals for children’s books, and they slowly peter out by the time you get to books for older readers, young adults or old adults.

It’s like that meme that was doing the rounds on the Internet a little while ago – when you’re a child people ask you what your favourite dinosaur is, but when you grow up they stop asking, like they don’t even care any more. For the record, I’m fond of the elasmosaurus – although technically the underwater critters aren’t dinosaurs, they’re marine reptiles. I don’t know why.

Anyway, the point is that kids books are rife with bears. And this is something that the Buntings point out (to great effect) in Another Book About Bears. The book begins with a typical story-book set up, “once upon a time there was a bear” sort of thing, but the bear in the book almost immediately interrupts the story to complain about how much work bears have to do because they’re in so many darn stories. They’d love to take a nap or eat dinner, but no – someone wants to read another book about bears, so they have to drop what they’re doing and “perform” the story.

Now, I’d really love to read the text behind the bear as he’s* interrupting said story.  There’s something about an Esquilax and a horse with the something of a rabbit and the body of something else. Anyhoo, that’s beside the point, as the rest of the book focuses on the bear and his fellow ursines trying to get out of being in another book by recommending a litany of other animals to replace them.

The book made me chuckle the whole way through – no problem engaging my inner four-year-old with this one.

It also put me in mind of the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. In that series, characters in books have a life to live behind the scenes, but have to perform the story every time someone reads it – much like the bears in this book. It’s an interesting idea, and it’s interesting to encounter it again here.

Jasper Fforde, incidentally, wrote a book about bears that wasn’t a children’s book, and I’ll be looking at that little gem at some point in the future.

In the meantime, if you get the chance, do make sure you read Another Book About Bears. You’ll be glad you did.

*Have you ever notice that most of the books about bears where there is one central bear in the story, the bear is a “he”? I find that interesting, and if anyone can think of any books featuring an ursine central character who is a “she”, I’d very much like to hear about it.