Slowly but surely

Piece by piece, category by category, I have been working on simplifying and quietening my life.

I started with my bedroom, working through to reduce the number of things so that it looks not empty but calm.

The containers just visible behind the chair will be picked up on Wednesday by the wonderful Anglo Doorstep Collections who, with maximum efficiency, courtesy and cheerfulness, come to remove — entirely free — the accumulation of impedimenta from our lives.

The house-calming bug has seized other family members too. Tomorrow — Tuesday — when I go to visit Hebe and Alice in their already beautiful and orderly home, there awaits an impressive hoard of Stuff To Go, ready to be added to my own remaining bits and pieces for collection.

Good, eh? 😃

I have worked on my clothing, reducing both the number of items and the colour palette, so that everything goes with everything else and layers can be added or removed according to the requirements of the weather.

Something I have not kept in my wardrobe — this rather surprised me — is a winter coat or jacket. I have 2 fleece gilets, and I find that in winter if I wear warm underwear, a long-sleeved shirt, a thick sweater, a gilet over the top, warm trousers and woolly socks and boots, plus gloves and a hat, I am warm enough either indoors without the heating on, or going outside. I have kept a packable rain mac, because wet weather is a different conversation — but I have disposed of my umbrella because I never use it. Hastings is a coastal town, almost always breezy; only people who have aspirations to emulate Mary Poppins bother with umbrellas.

Our kitchen is (we think) much improved.

The addition of a beautiful tray to the loathsome splashback in that eye-catching shade of Evil Green, made it look less worse. And just so you know, the tiles weren't our fault either. Oh — but maybe you love them?

The inbuilt cupboards are badly designed. The doors were huge but made of chipboard and hung on standard hinges. It doesn't take a genius to intuit that as a result they all sagged, however patiently often they were re-hung. So we took them off and I like it better.

The beady-eyed observer may note that there is a cup distressingly absent from that bottom shelf. When everything is washed up and put away, it looks like this.

Just at the moment the cup is employed in His Nibs's study, where he had a mug of tea to sustain him in the gruelling endeavours of writing fiction.

Naturally, I didn't go in — he's working — but if you peer closely you can see the missing cup perched within easy reach on top of the printer.

What else can I show you? The entranceway is calm and empty.

It looks through to the kitchen...

... and gives access to the living room...

... and what is now the dining room — the back sitting room, where we love looking out over the garden as we eat our meal together and chat about life, the universe and everything.

That's all I have to show you because what I cannot show you is what isn't there. The bags and boxes of things Anglo Doorstep Collections have kindly removed, and little things like the collection of earrings my granddaughter took to add to her own jewellery box, or big items like the pieces of furniture given away on the Hastings Give and Takery and Hastings Freegle.

But then there was the digital calming. Some while ago I came off Facebook, but kept an account with no friends there, to access medical advice and the said Hastings Give and Takery. But I found Facebook to have become so toxic an environment that I no longer wanted to be there at all, so I deleted my 'Ann Collins' account, my last presence there.

And then I moved on to sorting out my email, working through the multi-thousand-email archive accumulated since 2009, deleting or archiving offline (and not in the Cloud either). 

I got rid of WhatsApp in favour of the privacy-focused Signal, and I'm in process of slowly swapping out my Gmail for Proton. I cleared out all the tentacles of Google Chrome wound round the bowels of my computer.

I deleted just about everything I had stored in the Cloud, and Instagram.

I've kept Pinterest, and I left my YouTube channel up, because it has useful things there — the vlogs from The Campfire Church, and the recordings of a couple of my stories, and some family recordings of songs.

I have a smartphone, but it's ancient and won't take most up-to-date apps; and anyway I only ever use it as an occasional hotspot if our internet goes on the blink, or for secure access verification.

I de-registered my Kindle e-reader, and that'll be put on Freegle in a day or two.

Everything feels calmer and simpler — working in the kitchen is easy; I hadn't noticed before how annoying it felt when the surfaces were cluttered and the cupboards full.

The second closet in my bedroom still houses my charging station (my lamps are cordless, and I have more than one TENS machine, and of course my phone has to be charged), and our stash of store-cupboard food and our toolbox and camping-gas stove for times when there's an electricity outage. I like to keep things simple, but I also like to be prepared — not obsessively so, but just a few cans and jars in hand and some longlife milk and packets of tea, that kind of thing.

So, for the moment at least, I think I'm done with the sorting and clearing. I'd accumulated a lot, and it feels better without it — more spacious, more peaceful.

My next task is in a quite different category.

In former years, I had so many people in my life. I still do, but they're mostly online because that's where my life mostly is now. I miss the friendliness and companionship of someone to chat with, to drink tea with. Yes, I miss that a lot.

I see Tony every day, of course, and we enjoy one another's company. A couple of times a week I see other members of my family just for a chat and a catch-up.

I have just begun to go to Wednesday night Compline online with David and Martin, which is lovely.

But I miss church fellowship, and the physical companionship of friends and neighbours. Life in the 21st century is very very different from life in the 20th century.

So my next task is figuring out how to find that again. My money helps keep my little family afloat (and feed Clarence, who is a bottomless pit when it comes to Snack Pockets and Felix soup) as well as cover my own responsibilities, so I can't do anything where you have to pay — and that includes church, where the fundraising efforts seem to have escalated from assiduous to voracious. Plus woke socialism seems to be all over the UK church like a bad attack of chicken pox; I'm looking more for what C.S.Lewis called Mere Christianity.

In my ideal world, I'd like there to be a small housechurch with no overheads and a competent guitarist — and why not? That could happen, for sure. 

But I will pray into it and move towards it, and see what gives in the way ahead. 

Maybe I'll see you there.

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And just in case for you — as it does for me — the heading of this blog post keeps bringing a song to mind, here's Ben and Rose singing Slowly But Surely, just for your happiness. ❤️