CLEAN YOUR HOUSE, MADAM?

During my marathon with The Style Network, I came across this reality show “Clean House”, where the hosts and crew helped people, well, clean house.

And did those houses need cleaning out! I realized there is hoarding and there is hoarding. Living in those houses was the equivalent of living in a junkyard, albeit without those creepy crawly friends (I assume). And people actually lived like that for years at a time! Invariably, the hosts reported that family tensions were strong in these households.

Now that I can attest to. It brings back memories of the last one year in our old flat. We were far from the condition of the houses in the show, but our collective hoards were getting too much for our four-room HDB flat. And we were all neat and organization freaks of one kind or another. We were having tiffs every other day about whose junk was to blame for the untidiness in the house, and whose junk to throw out to make space. My books got the vote from Mum, I thought Dad’s books and liquor collection could go since he hardly even read the books and we were losing the XOs and Hennessys to evaporation anyway. Dad thought Mum had too much china and other housekeeping odds and ends etc etc. And SB was freshly back from Japan with trunks of clothes and books and nowhere to put them. She lived out of boxes for a record number of months. And both SB and I contemplated moving out.

I don’t know whose idea it was to get a new, bigger place for all of us, but that was what finally solved the problem and made us all one happy family again. But we also recognized that we couldn’t continue our various hoarding in an unlimited manner, so we have been very careful to cull our belongings regularly, which makes our relatives, my father’s foreign workers and our domestic helper very grateful. I think the most triumphant moment was when Dad decided to throw out his small appliance collection last year. This consisted of orphaned and/or broken remote controls, spoilt handphones (some dating back 10 years) and their chargers etc etc, carefully bubble wrapped and kept away. Dad used to take them out once a year, carefully dust them and put them away again. He refused to say why he wanted them, but I always thought he intended them for purposes related to future alien visits. Anyway, he finally threw them out last year with a lot of reluctance, but I think he felt a kind of martyred virtuosity after the fact, which we allowed him to enjoy.

I think I have the easiest time of it in the family, since I am not as disposed towards sentimentality and thrift. I seldom keep anything that does not serve a practical purpose, such as ornamental displays. That said, I am not totally devoid of useless hoards. I re-discovered these during this year’s spring cleaning:

Manuals of defunct computer games. I don’t play these games anymore, but these make excellent reads, especially those Maxis ones. My favourite ones have to be the SimCity 2000 and SimTower ones, and I still read them now and then for entertainment. They don’t write them the same these days.

I’m a Lego kid. Only a Lego character smiles while lying on a stretcher. Don't they make you smile too? If I had my own place, I would so have an entire Lego village laid out.

Yes, I do blow my own trumpet. This was my coming of age present from my parents, which now sits in splendid isolation, and taken out and polished once a year only. I have not totally abandoned the possibility of playing again, if I could only find somewhere with no teenagers and no KPI of X performances a year.

I know that SB is having major worries about her hoard when she comes home after four years. I will be standing by to see the show. Perhaps we would have to call in “Clean House” after all.