Róisín Ingle on . . . the clutter mountain

I don’t know what the daily war looks like in your house, but in my house at the moment it is being fought on the frontline of surfaces and the stuff that sits on top of those surfaces. To those who say “there is no daily war in my house, what is she on about?” I say, with the greatest of respect, you are a liar. Children or no children, the domestic life shared with at least one other person – or even a pet, or even alone – is a sort of battlefield.

We are all in the trenches. Sometimes winning. Sometimes losing. A lot of the time – in my case anyway – just burrowing further under the duvet in an attempt to hold back the approaching enemy. In this particular case: clutter.

I am the one who constantly goes on about it. About all the stuff. The stuff is everywhere. On the sideboard. On the dinner table. On the kitchen counters. Around the oven hob. On the so-called desk. So-called because it’s not a desk used for working at or thinking at or even colouring-in at. It is only and exclusively a clutter magnet.

You don’t need me to tell you what kind of stuff is on the surfaces in my house. It’s the usual. Hair bobbins. Bills. Jewellery. Make-up. Bicycle paraphernalia. Vouchers for pedicures that went out of date months ago. Hard-as- a-rock sandwich crusts. At night, I imagine all of these items talking to each other and coming up with new and ever more violent ways to encroach on more of our territory.

I wake up to find there are new things on the draining board by the sink, items that are not plates. A pair of earphones. A DVD. The clutter has advanced while we were sleeping. It is winning the battle. It will win the war.

I got a cleaner online. She was a lovely young Brazilian woman. After a few weeks she resigned. She said it was because our hours clashed with her English classes but I know the real reason. There was too much crap everywhere. It drove her away, straight into the arms of other people and their organised houses.

I am the one who goes on about the stuff but I don’t do anything. I talk about it a lot. About the new corners that have been colonised. The chairs that cannot now be sat upon because they are covered in weekend supplements. There is too much of it for anything to ever be done. It will never be fixed because it is too big a job.

I read compassionate magazine articles and encouraging books and they say just do one bit at a time. A mountain is only climbed step by step. Everest is there, they say, so that is why we climb it.

Mount Clutter is there, but so what? I know it cannot be conquered. I have resigned myself to walking around it, looking up at it occasionally. Mount Clutter will not be claimed, least of all by me. The other people in my house do not seem to notice. They are as one with the clutter. I am alone in the fight. I am not even fighting.

And then one day I come home from work and before I am even in the door, I know something is different. The air feels cleaner. I can see the sideboard, which is unusual. I wander around the house. There isn’t a single thing on any of the surfaces. I haven’t seen the pouf yoke for at least three months. It’s been obscured by an army of plastic animals. Now it is clear. Everything is. I can see clearly now the crap has gone.

Apparently, the man I live with decided, quietly, all on his own that we had reached peak clutter. He went around the house with bags doing what I haven’t been able to. He swiped the stuff into giant bin bags. All of it. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. Beautiful.

And yet. He put every bit of it in the corner of the sitting room. All the clutter. It was once spread around the house and now it takes up a whole corner in one part of the house. It is a ski slope of clutter. His mother comes and nearly has a fit. “What would your father say?” she says. “We can see surfaces now,” he says defensively.

We sit watching Fair City beside the ski slope. In the comforting knowledge that we can wander around the rest of the house and pretend we are minimalist types. Every so often, something slides and thuds from the top of the ski slope. We keep looking at the television because outside of this room is a Zen paradise. And this is a small price to pay.

roisin@irishtimes.com