death – Page 2 – Deborah Makarios

August 5, 2016October 20, 2017

An Invitation

According to Wallace Stegner in Angle of Repose, “it’s easier to die than to move … at least for the Other Side you don’t need trunks.”

There speaks someone who has too much stuff. And while you may be able to avoid moving house – and thus dealing with all that packing – death comes to us all in time. And then someone else has to deal with all our stuff (and they won’t thank us for it).

Does that seem a bit morbid? Then think of it this way. Moving may not be imminent. Death may not be imminent. But life – life is already here, and if you’re anything like me, your life is cluttered up with all that same stuff which would be such a pain in the neck to deal with if you moved and/or died.

While I fervently hope that death is not just around the corner for me (I would like to do a little more with my life before I go, and in any case I haven’t written my will yet), I am facing a Move.

Since there are wheels within wheels – or rather, asbestos within crumbling lino – we can’t move into our new home straight away. We don’t even have a firm moving date yet. This makes planning the move rather tricky at present. If I start packing now, we either do without whatever I pack for the next however many weeks, or I have to do some premature unpacking, which violates the cardinal law of successful moving. Wheels within wheels.

When I first created this blog, I wanted it to provide accountability for me, and encouragement for others. In that spirit, I invite you to fling-along in August as I work my way through the house reducing the quantity of things I will eventually need to pack.

As with so many things in life, pruning is easier when you’re not trying to do it all by yourself. I will be focussing on a different area each week, with a mixture of encouragement, ideas, my experiences, and hopefully yours. Feel free to use the comments section as a flingy-forum (although please note the usual ban on inappropriate or abusive content will still be in place – and that includes abusing yourself).

You can join in for a week, or for the whole month; you can offer advice, suggestions, or compose amusing working songs; you can share lists of what you’ve purged, or tallies, or weights, or even pictures, if my Luddism doesn’t get in the way.

Alone or not, I’m committed to a month of sort, purge and prune (with a side of judicious packing) – will you join me?

November 20, 2015

The Surprising History of the Bath

The humble bath is so often overlooked. This useful piece of household equipment just sits there, mostly unused, sometimes even downgraded to a mere surface for shower run-off, and yet, the stories it could tell…

A good many people have entered this vale of tears via a bath, since the popularity of water births has increased. One assumes that a warm bath is less of a nasty shock for the new entrant, although presumably they need to be fished out fairly sharpish so they can start breathing in the normal way.

Even more people have departed this vale of tears in the bath. Even overlooking all those who were insufficiently careful with their electrical appliances while bathing.
As it says in Green Eggs and Hamlet,
“To sleep, to dream, now there’s the rub
I could drop a toaster in my tub.”

Winner of the gong for “Most Often Portrayed Dead in His Bath” is Jean-Paul Marat. Marat was assassinated in his tub, which should serve as a warning to all mankind about not giving audiences to young ladies while in the bath, especially when your wife warns you not to!

Agamemnon’s wife is said to have murdered him in the bath, although frankly, after sacrificing their daughter, staying away ten years, and then arriving home with his mistress and their children, he had it coming.

Three of the nine women who believed themselves to be married to George Joseph Smith – under a variety of different names – died in their baths shortly after making wills in his favour. The experienced diver who was helping the pathologist figure out howdunnit had a narrow escape too – it took the pathologist and a doctor half an hour to bring her round.

That’s births and deaths, what about marriages? I thought things probably hadn’t got that far (except perhaps in California) until I saw this. Which, now I look into it, appears to be from California. Where anything can and probably does happen.

The bath is also a great place for thinking. Archimedes figured out the whole water-displacement-volume thing in his tub time, and then invented a scientific method of stealing someone else’s bathwater: the Archimedes’ Screw. Centuries later, the great Agatha Christie dreamt up plots while lying in the bath and munching apples.

I myself am entirely pro-bath. I have lived in bath-having houses for the last twelve years, and while I have nothing against showers, there is nothing so luxuriously comforting as a hot bath when you come home soaked through on a cold rainy day.

This probably seems all the more luxurious to me as bathtubs did not feature largely in my childhood. When I was very little, we lived in a place where clean water was a rare and treasured thing.

We had a little bowl of water to soap up with, and another little bowl to rinse off. Admittedly, I had less surface area back then, but it is actually possible to get clean that way, and it is definitely water-efficient.

Fast-forward a few years and it was bucket showers, with the hot water heated in an enormous black kettle over an open fire. Baths were sometimes had in a large pink plastic bowl, with each member of the family using the bathwater in turn (while Dad read The Lord of the Rings outside the bathroom door). Proper old-school, that was.

I do try to be eco-friendly, which is why I have not made maximal use of the baths available to me for the last decade or so. But I recently realized that two showers take about as much water as one bath. (Seriously, try putting the plug in next time you shower. You will be surprised. Especially if you only have a shower stall…)

And then I made my great discovery. Using the water-displacement theories of that great bather of antiquity, Archimedes, one can enjoy a deeper bath without using more water. How, you ask? Add mass, ideally in the form of one’s dearly beloved. The volume of water thus displaced is experienced as greater depth.

Eureka.

November 6, 2015

My Preciousss……

I love my books. I don’t think that will come as a surprise to anyone who a) knows me, b) has read more than a post or two of this blog, or c) has ever seen inside my house. I have even given careful consideration to the question of whether I am actually addicted to reading. I have not yet got to the point of piling them all in a heap and sleeping on my hoard like Smaug, but this is largely because books are not comfy to sleep on, and I’m bound to be seized by an uncontrollable desire to read one hiding at the bottom of the pile.

But I do not wish to be controlled by this love of books. While the dream-houses I drew plans for as a child were largely bed/bath/kitchen attached to a large library, I do not want my life to be swallowed up in service to the books. This necessitates a control on the volume of bookage, and since I have no wish to Never Acquire A Book Again (sits down with head between knees until shaking passes) that means that some books need to go, to make room for the new ones.

I’m not going overboard, mind you. I am not the kind of person who gets rid of all but ten of their books, or (shudders violently) tears out the bits they like and throws the rest of the book away. The man who inadvertently started the 100 Thing Challenge movement (aim: reduce number of personal possessions to 100 or less) did not count his books individually; in fact, I’m not sure he counted them at all.

I do find myself looking at the shelves reflectively, and considering which books would make the cut if I found myself relocating to somewhere with less book-space. There’s the books I absolutely couldn’t do without – the ones I’d pause to grab if the house was on fire; the books I re-read so often it would be folly to dispose of them; the books I’d really quite like to keep if at all possible; and the books I’m not quite so sure about. Featuring largely in the latter group: books I keep meaning to read, but haven’t yet.

Since I am unlikely to live in this house for the rest of my life (not unless I die soon, and please God I won’t), I am getting a head-start on the inevitable and starting to downsize now.

In October, I pruned out sixteen books (with the assistance of the Caped Gooseberry).

There were:
three books about English history – a mix of fiction and fact;
two dictionaries (one Spanish/English and one English/English), along with a book of etymology;
four assorted books on learning Latin (including the classic “Caecilius et Metella in horto stant”);
three books of quotations (I used to collect them, but now I tend to rely on the internet instead)
and a couple of random non-fiction books.

(There was also one ring, which I’d had for so long I can’t remember where it originated, but never wore, it being neither the right size nor to my taste. )

There are now two half-empty niches on the wall of shelves in the study, out of a total of twenty. Okay, 24, but the top four aren’t used for books (too high to reach without a stool). To give you an idea of how big the niches are: one contains a 12-volume Everyman’s Encyclopaedia and both volumes of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary.
It’s a start.

If you’re doing some decluttering too, please do leave a comment on what you’re up to below. It’s always nice to have company, besides the company of books!