poliphilo: (Default)
poliphilo ([personal profile] poliphilo) wrote2006-09-12 09:14 am

Housework

The house- abandoned in the middle of its makeover- looks like a newly excavated Pompeiian villa. 

But I'm very good at editing out information I don't want to engage with.  Mess- what mess?

And I'm hopeless at housework. Some people can just whisk round a room and it looks great; I plod round a room and it looks exactly as it did before.

I wouldn't know where to start.

I dream of living in a vast, white, minimalist apartment: Gleaming wood floors, no ornaments, furniture from the Bauhaus, a single late-period Picasso on the wall, windows looking out from a great height over a  rainy northern city...

I put this apartment into a story once and the first thing my heroine did- being a surrogate for me- was to cover the floor with an enormous toy train set, complete with houses and bridges and hundreds of little people.

[identity profile] poliphilo.livejournal.com 2006-09-16 09:03 pm (UTC)(link)
There was an artist a few years back who shredded absolutely everything he owned.

I love that kind of grand gesture. It's the sort of thing St Francis might have done.

[identity profile] jackiejj.livejournal.com 2006-09-16 09:05 pm (UTC)(link)
I've lost everything three times, and by the third time I came to love having nothing, making do.

I miss it!

One of my favorite stories to make up as I walk along is to pretend it's post WW III and I must live in some burned-out old building, and it contains only a table, a window, a rug.

[identity profile] poliphilo.livejournal.com 2006-09-16 09:33 pm (UTC)(link)
It's that Robinson Crusoe thing, isn't it?

We went round the shop today, working out just what we could afford on our budget, picking things up, putting them back, crowing over bargains- and it was a whole lot of fun.