Deborah Makarios – Page 167

February 5, 2016

Getting Back on the Horse

They (whoever “they” are) say you should always get back on the horse that threw you, so as to stymie any potential budding hippophobia. On the same principle, pilots who were shot down during the Battle of Britain were (if still in working order) sent back up at the next opportunity, presumably to forestall any phobia of heavily-armed homicidal airborne Nazis (a reasonable fear, under the circumstances, but one which for some reason does not appear to have an official name).

Since April last year, I’ve been keeping a rough record of what I managed to declutter, purge or prune from this household, and posting it on this blog. This is the horse, and late last year, it threw me. In November and December, I managed to purge about four things. Admittedly, one was a completed ten-year sewing project, but then, one was just something I found abandoned in the garden, so hardly counts as household decluttering.

In January, I am happy to say, I did much better.

The list is as follows:
a whole heap of plastic containers (some recycled, some donated)
two cake boards
a box of old transfers which I never used
knitting needle tip protectors
a glass bauble, apparently designed to look like the severed head of Santa Claus (although this may have been unintentional)

two hanks of tapestry wool (I don’t do tapestry)
a fancy flavoured salt I’ll never use because it has MSG in it
14 cassette tapes
eight CDs
five games
two jigsaw puzzles
two DVDs
three pens (ball-point, fountain and dip, respectively)
a bottle of ink for aforementioned dip pen
42 assorted books, which I am fairly confident would fill a metre of shelving

So be encouraged. Just because the horse threw you, doesn’t mean you can’t get back on. The horse might even behave itself beautifully. For a while, at least…

February 3, 2016

Subtraction

Do you have anything more to remove in order to achieve your perfect design? What’s next on your hit list?

January 29, 2016

Lost Virtues

Virtue and eccentricity, I hear you asking, what’s the link? Is there one?
There is. Follow me, not into the dark forest of Stygian gloom, but into the sun-dappled meadows where virtues frolick with daisies in their hair, while eccentrics play diversion on a penny-whistle and grave-faced philosophers play hopscotch on the lawn.

John Stuart Mill asserted that eccentricity and moral courage went together. Maya Angelou said that “courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” Eccentricity -> courage -> virtue. Start with a funny hat and work your way up to defying the evils of your time.

In fact, virtuousness is itself becoming increasingly eccentric – as the moral centre of society moves away from virtue, virtue becomes necessarily off-centre. The modern world seems to have only one virtue: tolerance.
But tolerance is not a virtue.

Hear me out. Being tolerant can be a good and right thing to do, such as when someone insists on telling you all about this amazing new wonder-diet they’re on that will bring about world peace if people will only try it, and you tolerantly don’t attempt to smack the stupid right off them. But it can also be a wrong and evil thing to do, which naturally debars it from being a virtue. Consider: when elements of the Roman Catholic hierarchy covered up the abuse perpetrated by those in their own ranks, they were tolerating the abuse, tolerating something which should be intolerable to all, and not only to its victims.

Tolerance. Not always good. Not a virtue.

The reason I chose the example of child abuse (and my apologies to anyone who finds mentions of it traumatic) is because in this heyday of moral relativism it is one of the few things that most people are prepared to agree is a bad thing. Well, I’m going to take the courage of my convictions (happily, no sentence yet) and say that there are some things which are good, and some bad, and some better than others. And because I do not wish to be a Negative Nellie, instead of dwelling on the bad, I intend to look at the good: the virtues.

And they are good. Virtues get a bad rap (because vices have better PR). Virtuousness is seen as priggish, boring and smug – even life-denying. This is the complete opposite of the truth. As Agatha Christie pointed out in The Pale Horse, evil is “necessarily always more impressive than good. It had to make a show!” This is why things like smoking and gambling have such big advertising budgets. It’s all in the presentation. If you stuck with the plain facts of the matter, there’d be no takers. Virtue is less flashy, but then, real gold doesn’t glitter; and it certainly doesn’t flash like neon.

So, during the next year or thereabouts, I want to have a look at a few of the glorious virtues which we seem to have devalued and scrapped. Humility. Modesty. Loyalty. Gentleness. Moderation. Self-control. We might even have a look at Bissonomy and Tubso. But don’t worry, this blog isn’t going to suddenly become all ethics all the time – eccentrics and aesthetics must have their share of the fun too. (The Eccentric Ethic & Æsthetic: does what it says on the tin.)

And it will be fun. Because there is right and there is wrong, and if your life of right is grey and dreary, you are doing it wrong.