The art of downshifting – finding freedom with the simple life

I was thinking the other day about wabi-sabi, which is a Japanese philosophy I follow, and it made me think of my parents’ house and what a lesson it was to me in interior design. For all the wrong reasons.

The house was a council property, built in 1947 and designed by some enlightened architect, who got the entire housing estate right.

I didn’t know how lucky I was, growing up in that house. It wasn’t large, but it was designed in a spacious way. It was brick-built, with solid internal walls. There were big casement windows everywhere that opened out fully. There was crosslight. There were French windows in the living room, giving out onto large gardens and – in our case – woodland right down one side, as we were the last house in a cul-de-sac.

Downstairs, a front door flanked by a frosted glass window that flooded the hallway with light led to stairs to the upper floor and a corridor to the kitchen, and a built-in rack for coats. The kitchen was a masterpiece of design – a coal-burning stove in one corner, raised on a stone dais; a big ceramic Butler sink with teak drainers; a huge north-facing larder with real stone shelves for keeping milk and butter cool (this was in the days before many people had refrigerators).

A door led to a rear corridor and thence to a room that most people used for storage or as a workroom (later, with increasing prosperity, for freezers etc, and later still my father made his wine in here). In front of it was the coal-hole (we still ran on coal then – several tons of it a year), and a cubbyhole for the bins. There was also an outside loo, so you didn’t have to stomp upstairs in your wellies. This section had stable doors, though most people closed it off with full doors for greater security.

The living room, like the whole ground floor, was tiled in terracotta and black tiles, laid in a square pattern, and the deep windowsills were terrazzo. All the doors were panelled oak.

Upstairs, two large bedrooms overlooked the street, with a small back bedroom and a bathroom (cast-iron bathtub) overlooking the garden, all with large casement windows. A massive cupboard for storage was built-in at the top of the stairs, and another, with slatted shelves, was built in as an airing cupboard over the hot water tank in the bathroom. Alcoves in every bedroom were big enough to take wardrobes or to build in closets.

Add the huge attic, and you can see how much space there was in this small house – a workshop, storage for bikes, two toilets. But of course, my parents, being aspirational like most people, proceeded to clutter it up.

The first thing I remember them doing was ripping out the Butler sink. Who could have told them then that these ‘stone’ sinks would one day be so desirable, along with the sturdy brass taps they loathed? In went the shallow stainless steel sink with built-in drainers so beloved of the 1960s (I assume the teak ones went in the fire…). In place of the old wooden worktop, they installed a yellow laminate work surface – laminate being the fresh new thing. Because they’d turned the kitchen around, you now couldn’t reach the windows to open them.

The larder, designed to keep food cold, became home instead to the spindryer (no tumble-dryers in those days) and storage for mountains of crockery, which was always glacial (they did, at least, keep bread in here, where it wouldn’t spoil). Meanwhile, they built a cupboard above the fridge, in the alcove opposite, and kept the canned food and baked goods here, where they suffered from the warmth rising from the heat exchanger.

The kitchen was designed to eat in, near the small coal stove, but instead, my mum and dad set up a huge oak dining table in front of the French windows in the living room, blocking both light and access to the garden. I barely saw those windows open twice a year (in fact, for most of my life they were painted shut). In every place, in every room they placed huge, unwieldy pieces of furniture that you had to squeeze around, and the outside loo was usually home to a lawnmower and completely unusable.

The tile floors, of course, to them were a sign of poverty, so in the living room they laid wall-to-wall carpet. But they couldn’t afford a good wool carpet, so it was an acrylic carpet of unimaginable awfulness – a cream background with a screaming floral pattern.  Nor did it actually meet the wall at one side, so they shoved in another bit of carpet that didn’t match. Later, they would replace this carpet with one even more vomit-inducing, in shades of green and orange. In the hallway, the carpet that covered the tiles was protected in turn with a plastic runner that transformed the corridor into a slipway – lethal on a wet day. In the kitchen, the ceramic tile was covered with floral lino, and then with vinyl tiles in blue and black.

The green and orange carpet in the living room which they laid in the 70s matched the new wallpaper, which was a design of huge green circles in vertical rows – as big as a dinner plate – and, naturally, in wash-down vinyl, as if a house was something that has to be steam-cleaned every five minutes to keep it hygienic. This replaced the simple whitewash with which the house had been supplied and you can imagine the effect of all these enormous patterns crowding in on one another.

Meanwhile, the windowsills became home to pot plants by the dozen, blocking the light and shedding leaves everywhere and making the windows impossible to open. Conforming to the social norms, the three-piece suite (which they retained even when there were only two of them in the house) took up almost the entire floor space.

While downstairs was cluttered beyond belief, especially after my parents began to collect antiques in the late 70s, the upstairs remained almost hostile in its bleakness. Freezing cold for much of the year (no central heating in those days), it did have carpets (though no underlay, as they couldn’t afford it), but my parents never had more than a bare lightbulb handing from the ceiling in their bedroom. I don’t even remember a bedside lamp, though I’m guessing my mum must have had one. Upstairs was not somewhere you hung around – I used to put my clothes in front of the living room fire for the next day, so they’d be warm enough to get into.

It pains me now to think how different the house might have been if my parents had been able to accept what it was instead of fighting it. To have a few simple, plain – perhaps country – things rather than aspiring to middle-class tastes that they could only fall short of. If, basically, the interior had been more wabi-sabi.

Imagine it with those simple, tiled floors in place, and a few scattered rugs, with rough-plastered walls, with bleached floorboards upstairs and an iron bedstead (instead of my 70s divan with its plastic-covered headboard). With the storage used properly and all the remaining spaces left empty.

The truth was, the house had a wonderful Vermeer-like simplicity about it that my parents just couldn’t recognise (and nor, as a child, of course, could I). I’ve seen it since in Lutyen’s houses and Tudor houses and in farmhouses all over this region of France, houses with an enormous comfort and quietude about them – settings for the fabric of life.

The key elements are that everything is well-made and fit for its purpose, and our house fitted that bill. It used good and honest materials that needed to make no apologies for themselves – brick and stone, terrazzo and tile, wood and glass. There was masses of storage and room to build in more. Above all, it had the two most crucial components any house requires – space and light. But my parents squandered it like many people, by stuffing their home with clutter that they spent their lives cleaning and manoevring around and insuring and repairing. In later years, it was more museum than house and it felt to me as if the house owned them rather than the other way around.

The house is now in other people’s hands. I haven’t seen it in decades and I only hope that it is faring better under new ownership. But Britain being what it is, I’d bet you a tenner that it still has fitted carpets…

I got a fun press release from Lifesworth this morning.

Apparently, in the UK at least, you’re ‘worth’ the most at the age of 46.

They’re talking in terms of personal possessions, of course, not your real worth (don’t get me started…). The average mid-life Brit apparently owns about £40k’s worth of goods and chattels – more than you ever have in your life before or afterwards. Interestingly, though, that same average Brit also believes their personal possessions amount to about £28k and underinsures them accordingly.

This, of course, is Lifesworth’s objective – to get you to up your insurance premiums, but I must confess the idea of being ‘worth’ £40k made me laugh out loud. I doubt I am ‘worth’ half this now, and it’s very definitely by design.

Over the years, I’ve come to the belief that people are at their most free and creative when they’re not burdened by possessions. Sure, it’s great to own things, but once you’ve got them, you have to worry about them. Clean them, dust them, store them, take care of them, insure them. Is this really a good idea? Better to have plates you can afford to break, clothes you can afford to ruin without there being any heartache involved. Then you don’t have to work so hard to support a lifestyle. Maybe you can just have a life instead.

The DH and I, some 10 years ago, were forcibly relieved of much of our burden of possessions by a burglary. After the initial relief that no-one was hurt (the house was empty at the time), came the absolute fury about what had been taken – our wedding presents to each other, the Victorian writing box my parents gave me when I was 16, Steve’s favourite watch, the World War II marching compass I’d bought him in six instalments, his entire collection of aviation memorabilia, my late father’s clock. There were also our computers, all of our coats, the throws off the sofas, the curtain tie-backs – a strange assortment of finds. It was Christmas, and they had gone shopping in our house.

A wealthy friend patted me on the head and said: “Trish, they’re only things,” which only incensed me more because a: his parents subbed his lifestyle and he’d never had to work, and b: many of them were things that I had bought and paid for, worked many hours at a job I hated in order to own. They were MINE, for God’s sake.

And then I thought again. Why exactly was I working all these awful hours in horrible jobs just in order to buy stuff? None of it was necessary stuff – it was pretty, it was nice to have, but it wasn’t the roof over my head, it wasn’t food on the table. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t make a difference. Sure, it’s nice to be surrounded by pretty things, but it’s not necessary to fulfilment.

Some of the items had sentimental value, but this too is an imaginary construct. I didn’t drop dead for the loss of any of them. And the truth may be something else, too. Every time I looked at that clock I remembered that my mother wouldn’t give it to me when dad died but had made me pay £200 for it. Whenever I looked at the writing box, I was chastened by the split it had picked up when I placed it too close to a radiator. Steve had bought his favourite watch the same day as a near-identical one for his ex-wife, which coloured my view of it somewhat.

A couple of years went by and although we sometimes winced when we thought of what had been taken, we found we didn’t need to replace much, other than the work computers. When we did buy, we hit on a strategy of buying only things we could use, not things that were purely ornamental. And gradually, gradually, we began to divest.

I can’t remember now what went first, but every year that goes by, we have sloughed off more of our belongings, and every year we feel better for it. We’ve got rid of clothes, books we’ll never read again, ripped all our CDs into I-Tunes and chucked the discs, put item after item of furniture into the local depot vente. The house feels bigger, emptier, more spacious. There is less cleaning to do, less maneouvring around things. Both our lives and our souls free freer for it, and I hope, in time, to get to a stage where nothing I own has ANY monetary value at all.

I wonder where this would put me on the Lifesworth scale? Probably a complete loser. But I frankly I have no truck with a society where a person’s worth is calculated by what they own and not by what they contribute. If the latter was calculated, where on this scale would the average lawyer, PR executive or stockbroker be? A damn sight further down than the lowly-paid nurse or cleaner or ambulance driver.

If you want to calculate your worth on Lifesworth, click here (only relevant to UK residents).

Average age and value of possessions in the UK
20 - £24,548
30 - £34,823
40 - £40,125
50 - £40,454
60 - £35,810
70 - £26,192

A few years back I used to enjoy a very guilty pleasure from watching a TV programme called Escape to the Country.

It was just another one of those estate agency programmes that litter the UK networks (Big Strong Boys, Place in the Sun, Big Strong Boys In The Sun, you know the kind of thing…). Each day, an aspiring couple, tired of the city, would decide to move to the country and task an estate agent with finding the right thing. Three or four properties would be chosen, and the people would view two of them. Brits being Brits, of course – a bunch of whingeing Poms – they’d never like any of them.

One thing that always struck me, though, was the repeatedly expressed opinion (by the women) that moving to the countryside would entail less housework because ‘it’s so much cleaner’.

Hah bloody hah I’d think. Cleaner my backside. You’ll learn, missy.

The countryside is filthy compared with the city. Spiders, spider webs, flies, fly shit, chestnut pollen, poplar fluff, willow seeds, stone dust, barley chaff, arsenic bugs, dead leaves, dust, mud. I wonder which bit of the countryside these women are planning to move to that’s magically cleaner than town. They’re in for a nasty shock.

I know because it was a shock to me. I was thinking about it again this weekend, as I scoured and scrubbed the kitchen and living room (penance for my taking all Saturday off to drive around the region, having a girly good time while the DH was working).

It starts in spring, when the house fills up with pollen and seeds – hazelnut, followed by poplar, followed by willow, which carpets the courtyard (and our ground floor) in white bunnies (called “kittens” in French). Then comes the chestnut pollen, which smells exactly like semen, in case you didn’t know – hence the local name ‘spunk trees’.

Meanwhile, in the gravel courtyard, up comes whatever my farmer neighbour Patrick planted last year, seeded into every crack. Every other year it’s wheat, but we’ve had maize, barley, rye and oats as well. Oats are particularly persistent, being a very natural sort of cereal and if I don’t get them all out, by late summer I’ve lost the path to the woodshed.

In an old stone house like this, the stone constantly sheds. Nobody told me that, did they? This house is ‘granite doux’, and doux (soft) it certainly is. It has to be constantly vacuumed to keep the dust at bay, and the rough, uneven surface provides a lovely home for spiders.

Spiders, of course, are just a way of life. We have to pretend different to visitors, but there are big crawly ones hiding in every crack, and overnight some of them will spin webs across a doorway or over a mirror. I get rid of them with a big brush that looks like a giant loo brush – the best thing ever invented, but you can never stay on top of them. “A happy home has spider’s webs,” say the French, so I’m happy to go with that. They’re at their worst in summer.

I don’t kill them though – being a bit of a Buddhist – so I catch them in a big plastic jar with a lid and put them outside (my job, since the DH is scared witless of them). After all, spiders kill flies, which are much more of a problem. They start as soon as the weather warms up, coming out to feed on the ivy, and by mid-summer most of us here have fly papers (cat-friendly, of course) in every room, buzzing frantically with dying insects. I also have a bead curtain at the doorway. It is pretty useless, but I can’t bear fly screens. We only put these up once the mozzies start in late summer, and only then out of dire necessity.

With the flies, comes fly shit – something I’d never encountered before moving to France. Little brown or black dots of velcro-like persistence that coat all your windows, along with every cup, plate or pan you leave out on show. I quickly learned, in our open-plan kitchen, to wash utensils before every use. And after the flies come the wasps, attracted by our calva pear orchard and as insistent as they are dumb. The only things worse are the hornets, the sight of which has me running for cover. With these beasts, I am not going to argue.

Then there’s the pets. Who doesn’t love the little darlings? But with six cats and a big-pawed mud magnet of a spaniel, no surface stays print-free for long, as the cats leap up with fur wet from the grass onto the sideboard and coffee table, and every two weeks there’s a faint brown line right round the sofa where the dog’s rubbed himself dry. Thank heavens for removable covers on all the furniture, and pale grey paint on the woodwork (believe me, it hides a multitude of sins). From spring right through to winter the critters tread either dust or mud into the house in kilos, and you can’t teach them to wipe their feet.

There’s also the question of hair, and if anyone’s allergic to cats, they’d better never come in this house. Yesterday, after a period of neglect while I painted the bedroom, etc, I swept up a small dead animal’s worth of fur from the living room floor. I like sweeping, which is quite contemplative, but I also can’t afford to keep filling hoover bags, so it’s a necessity as well as a choice. A damp rag is the best thing for getting fur off close covers, if anyone’s interested.

Autumn, of course, means the house is full of leaves. Surrounded by orchard and woodland as we are, hundreds of kilos of leaves are shed around the house every year and a fair proportion has to make its way indoors, along with the odd rotting apple brought in by mutley as a toy.

Then, come winter, there’s just as much muck in the house, only it’s a different colour. As anyone with a woodburner will tell you, your house is covered with a fine layer of ash the whole time you use it, along with soot that drops out of the chimney and coats everything around the stove. Ours is peculiarly crystalline and gritty, which is just as well, as we usually get a bird or two down there each season, and you can brush it off a kestrel or an owl relatively well. But it renders housework like the Forth Bridge. I can write my name in the dust an hour after cleaning and whenever it rains, great rivulets of soot and rust pour down the back of the register plate over my freshly painted stonework, which gets whitewashed every summer.

So now you know, country lovers. There’s a reason we country dwellers all have hard floors and no curtains. And in this house at least, we have two rules: never start cleaning, and whatever you do, never look up.

An old tyre protects a self-seeded sapling

Many of the trees in our garden are self-seeded saplings we’ve allowed to grow. We reckon we’ve added as many as 250 trees this way, some of which are now very large.

The problem comes when a seedling appears in areas of grass that we normally mow. If the grass grows too long before the first cut of the year, there’s a danger we won’t see the seedling and it gets cut down. We’ve tried to avoid this by marking seedlings with sticks. But even then, because we don’t have the time to trim around each seedling, and given that it’s difficult to mow very close, the seedling still gets swamped by a clump of grass.

Over the years, we’ve made very effective use of what the French call ‘toile de paillage’ (literally, straw cloth) – permeable plastic sheeting that suppresses growth while allowing water to penetrate. But it’s expensive. And when used in areas that we mow, there’s always a danger of clipping the plastic sheet, winding up with long threads wrapped around the drive shaft of the mower blades. This can cause a surprising amount of damage to the mower.

The plastic sheeting also needs to be held down by something. You can buy expensive spikes for this purpose – we used to have some plastic ones, but they’re all broken now. And with our rock-infested land, they rarely work well.

We’ve tried using rocks – we have plenty of those – or even faced granite stones from the long-demolished buildings that once stood on our land. But hitting them with the mower is no fun either.

One alternative is old carpet, if it consists only of natural fibres. This doesn’t need pinning down, but it presents the same mowing dangers as the plastic, so we use it only in areas well away from those we mow.

This year, we’re taking a recycling approach. I cut circles of the permeable plastic from an old sheet of the stuff we had lying around. These are held down by old tyres. These are easily seen – and thus avoided – when mowing. And if the mower does hit them, it’ll simply nudge them out of the way.

They’re not permanent features around the saplings: they’re needed only until the young trees are high enough to be clear of the grass.

As an alternative to the plastic sheet, we may also try using actual straw inside the tyres – we have an endless supply of this as we have friends who need to dispose of it when they muck-out their donkey enclosures.

End result: free trees that will grow faster because of this (free) protection.