On the ghost of minimalism past and egg cookers
I never felt a more crushing sense of defeat than when I watched the tiniest water bubble rise slowly to the top of my plug-in egg cooker’s plastic cover and evaporate neatly through an air ventilation hole after playing its part in producing the perfectly hard-boiled egg. Because it was with this domestic stream of steam that the last of my lofty aspirations to minimalism vanished. Sacrificed on the breakfast altar of a crumbly (!!) yolk.
Until recently, minimalism wasn’t something that I practised or subscribed to but something that I did by sheer necessity. Between the ages of 19 and 28 I lived in 10 different flats. There is only so many times you can pack and physically carry all your belongings until you start questioning whether a forest green roll-up puzzle mat and a purple chocolate fountain are really essential to your living arrangements.
Even when I moved into more permanent lodgings with my boyfriend, I prided myself on the fact that we had one breakfast bowl and four glasses. I loved the feeling that we were using everything we owned.
Getting sucked into the storage vortex
The beginning of the end to my spartan ideals announced itself by means of a grainy video. During a remote viewing of our current flat, the estate agent enthusiastically gestured to the cupboards nestled into the eaves declaring them ‘terrific storage’. My 2-metre boyfriend wouldn’t be able to stand up straight in any of our rooms, but why worry about that if he could easily fit into those cosy cupboards. Alongside however many frivolous kitchen appliances I could dream of.
And so came years of innocently putting stuff ‘away’. We would have happily continued on, if it wasn’t for my boyfriend’s decision to move back to Spain resulting in a reckoning with our out-of-sight-out-of-mind storage habits. As we’ll be splitting our time between Spain and the UK for the foreseeable future, we had to go through all our belongings. What we didn’t anticipate was how much stuff we didn’t want in either place.
And it is such a struggle to break free. You may be surprised to read this, but nobody wants our terrific storage crap. Facebook Marketplace, Gumtree, we’ve tried it all. I get that there might not be much interest in a shower stool bought to ensure safe personal hygiene practices with a leg cast, but even once-worn-because-too-small Dr Martens for the fraction of their original price only provoke a flutter of interest among potential buyers. (Predictably, the item that has seen more naked butt action is the one that we’ve received more inquiries about 🍑👀).
My minimalist identity crisis culminated in our final day of packing. After extensive review, I had to concede that the plug-in egg cooker was only the plastic-globed tip of the iceberg. I have enough of EVERYTHING to easily live in two places. To deal with the shock, I re-watched the Minimalism documentary that initiated my awakening. I think it was when the 20-something quintessential US college boy grinned into the camera with a duffle bag and the 60 pieces that constitute all his belongings proudly proclaiming that he had been ‘homeless’ for the past years, that I started seeing just how off-putting overt minimalist evangelising can be. Tone-deaf college boys aside, I vowed that things would be different in our flat in Spain.
New flat, new me OR The stuff strikes back
The moment we arrived at our apartment last week, I moved the deco staples of any beach holiday apartment (blue starfish ornament + potpourri + a wooden lettering sign that reads ‘dream’) and a pair of deer and doe water colours (okay, quirky!) into the back of a cupboard to create as clean of a slate as possible. And I must say the place started looking satisfyingly close to what I saw pictured as the ideal in aforementioned documentary. No terrific storage here!
Minimalism reality check #1 was curiously imparted by our new toilet. During my first visit to the bathroom, I was greeted by a supplementary cascade escaping from the water canister. It was as if the toilet was sticking its tongue out to say: ‘Calling yourself homeless to underscore just how minimalist you are is great, if you have the funds to check into a hotel with a working toilet at the end of the day’.
What broke me though (literally) was the one-bladed potato peeler pictured below. Repeated attempts to persevere lest I should buy another thing, led to the sacrifice of a significant chunk of my ring finger. Minimalism reality check #2: Draw your line at health and safety risks.
The minimalist’s chamber of horrors
Admitting defeat, I took my bloody finger to an establishment with the innocent-sounding name ‘Decofiesta’ to purchase a safer peeling device. And a fiesta it was …. If my new temporary lodgings were a timid shrine to the aesthetics of minimalism, decofiesta was what you’d get if all the world’s careless plastic production came together to tap-dance on minimalism’s grave. Sowing thread, knitting needles, outdoor furniture cushions, table plastic covers, toilet brushes, spoons, pots, glitter pens, Halloween masks, soap dispensers, place mats, squishy balls and more all available in purple, red, rose, lemon, sunflower, orange, kiwi, forest green, aquamarine, baby blue, turquoise, mauve, beige, mustard, dark brown and black for less than the price of petrol I paid to get to the shop.
Swaying under the weight of our collective throwaway production, I grabbed the first potato peeler I could find after 37 (!!!) minutes of an increasingly desperate search and hurried back to my deco-free abode vowing to never return.
And yet, the decofiesta experience haunts me still. When I lie awake at night, I have visions of myself wandering endlessly through aisles littered with millions of items, forever searching that one thing I actually need. The only sounds are my shallow breathing echoing off of deco-free walls and the occasional beep of a cash register.