Midlife Madness

For those that know me they know that I don’t live in a home where everything has a place and everything remains in its place. Oh, how I wish that were the case. I basically want to live in a show home, where every night an army of elves return everything to its rightful place.

I must confess to not being the tidiest of people but trying to maintain any kind of order in our house is like a fullon military battle, which mostly, I lose! When I cook I try to kind of clear up as I go along (with transparency I must confess that ‘im indoors may not agree), but sometimes I return when others have cooked and our relatively small kitchen looks the set of MasterChef when there are at least half a dozen contestants! Almost every cooking utensil is used and the mess is not just confined to the kitchen, another puzzling feature of the chaos.

But it’s not a daily occurrence, whereas our pile of shoes in the hallway increases by the day. We have a very tasteful basket for shoes but only about 1% of the shoes seem to fit in t. Why? Because members of the family seem absolutely unable to put any shoes upstairs in their wardrobes. Now if we had a porch or a dedicated area for hallway clutter I could perhaps learn to live with it but with shoes and coats – also not enough space on the hooks - the hallway constantly looks like a jumble sale. Now here I can say I am relatively innocent I maybe have one pair of boots that I felt were a bit muddy to go back in the wardrobe but the entire footwear hallway wardrobe – flip flops to wellies are all there from the others in the family.

I have long since been ridiculed for ‘tidying’ before our cleaner comes each week and of course, my argument is that she can’t possibly clean if every single surface is covered with huge piles of unconnected but obviously very useful items. I say obviously very useful because surely, they would have been ditched if not useful, right, but in all honesty what exactly they have planned for the packs of staples bought in error that don’t fit the stapler or the pens that no longer emit enough ink to write!

Then there are things that I can see will be useful like the takeaway menus, we all have them for pizza, Chinese meals, curry or kebabs but I bet like me you are as likely to look them up and order through an app on your phone. Then there is the second very important point that WE HAVE A PLACE FOR THEM. Why is it people seem to find it impossible to ever put anything back in its place? We also have a magazine rack and a place for old newspapers but fighting your way through the ones in the lounge is like a trek through a jungle- without a machete.

And of course NOT putting things back in their place means that no one can ever find them – so there are a thousand cries of ‘where is the …’ well if It had been put back in its place we’d all know where it would be. Now wouldn’t that be a way of making life easier? The worst of all is the car keys now we do have hooks for those but of course, they are often not on the hooks but in someone else’s pocket or a room or anywhere else at all but notably not on the hook. Honestly, it can delay the start of a journey by a very stressful 15 minutes.

I don’t feel I ask for much just that people would put things away I mean what is the point of having a place for everything if no one ever puts things back in said place? I have the perfect solution though, I need to go live in a hotel.