Housekeeper's Diary

Finally, some rhythm to the month, just as it draws to a close. But it doesn’t matter. For the year has finally begun. Today then: a new cabinet in the bathroom to be made useful. Copper wire baskets just waiting to be filled. The things I found in the old one: more hair bobbles than any one woman could possible need and a penchant for fake tan, I clearly never indulge: my skin so pale it it almost milky. A constantly revolving parade of shower curtains I cannot get on with. This one too dark, the next too plasticky, oh and this one, oddly smelly. An ambush of chemical fragrance everytime we swish it along the rail.

These things are sent to try us. Though of course they are but distractions from the real stuff of life: Ste still suffering and my Dad fainting on a plane and forgetting to tell me about it. My own life rampaging her way towards the Peri-Menopause and apparently unwilling to make any bones about it. An appalling state of affairs I do believe there is a deep shroud of silence upon, though it surely cannot be that in its aftermath one forgets, like the bliss of a newborn baby creates in those who pass off the unspoken horror that is giving birth?

(Though, as my cheeky child frequently reminds me, he has not yet been “born” but was in fact “ceasaered” and thus I cannot claim solidarity with those women who really suffered, as apparently I only did half a job! A refrain he has stuck by since he was six and shows no signs of abandoning in favor of gratitude to the Mama who brought him into this world!

Now, two hard-boiled eggs and a cup of tea. Fleeting thoughts of last night’s film still wandering through my head. Though I want to be out stomping about in the beautiful cold sunshine up and down the green, green grass of the frozen hills nearby, there is too much to do here. In both the house and my virtual home. Beds to be changed and words to be written. Laundry to be folded and so many words to spill. The deep silence of so much domesticity my constant companion as I push pillows into lavender fragranced cases, and speak the paragraphs I will later type, out loud. Trying out sentences and trying to capture ideas. like so many butterflies.

I think I can taste Spring today. Though I love her when she arrives, some of me remains convinced that it is she who steals the chances of my ever creating the deep sense of Hygge I covet, but can so rarely conjure up in the Winter months. For Hygge takes work. It is in fact an emotional and creative challenge most of us haven’t got the stamina for. Work that we only have the concentration span for, when the sun isn’t shyly smiling at our windows. It is more than cinnamon buns and board games. So much more than cozy socks, fairy lights and blankets. Something so far removed from the dream we have been sold by the myriad of bandwagon books and blogs that have run amok over the past two or three years, that I was mildly astonished to read it described as for the woman who wants to live a life MORE ordinary on a Facebook page recently. For there is nothing ordinary about creating true Hygge. We experience it so rarely in homes, that she capable of creating genuine Hygge has ambition FAR beyond being ordinary, and is instead a domestic magician. An extraordinary woman, of whom there are very few among us.

I am tired of the internet lately (Gosh. Is one, thus, tired of life?). I am tired of the sniping, the silly arguments and the petty jealousies, the backstabbing, content-stealing, casual racism and the fake spins on real truths. It is why I am, like so many of the long-established bloggers I know, focusing everything I have got on nurturing my own tiny community, not chasing numbers on a Facebook page but offering real value, a safe space free from drama, and something that is more than a bandwagon, but is in fact a way of life.
A way of life I practice in order to share. A way of life that is more than just a zeitgeist word.

Now though, the child I didn’t birth has arrived home, hungrier than ever. A dash to feed him, before drum lessons and a cinema date I have long promised him, now my head has been dis-lodged from my laptop. Later a bath in charcoal and magnesium, a face mask and a liberal dosing in Sleepy balm, all the better to catch my Z’s.

This then. Life itself. Stinky shower curtains and all.