No Lion, the B*tch and the Wardrobe

When living my values makes me grumpy, and why that is ok.

Anyone interested in how we rebuild the habits of solidarity and resist the disconnecting tides of individualism should go read this piece from

Connective Tissue

. It’s a bracing challenge to those of us who spend a lot of time theorising:

But a genuine commitment to solidarity (in any form) requires a genuine commitment to proximity and mutuality. My favorite colloquial definition of solidarity is “to carry each other’s burdens”; this definition alludes to how solidarity is both a physical act and a spiritual act. It requires being in physical proximity — in our workplaces, our neighborhoods, our third places, and our living rooms — with those who are different than us. It also requires a spiritual mutuality: they need to need us, and we need to need them, not just as a one-off, but consistently over time.

Without this sustained proximity and mutuality — talking about solidarity in Aspen and Cambridge but not practicing it in our communities — we’re just engaging in a new type of virtue signaling.

Oooof. I was in fact talking about this in Aspen this year while other people in my community were doing the real work. I have been feeling this challenge especially acutely this week. I’m going to tell you a story which I hope might help us understand why it’s so hard to actually resist the atomising formation of our western cultures and move towards each other. Why the “real” economy will squeeze out the gift economy every time, unless we are prepared to push back, hard. And what actually helps us, even under these conditions, to continue to take tiny steps towards each other. Towards interdependence and in

Dougald Hine

’s lovely phrase “regrowing a living culture”.

……

I’ve been a bit overwhelmed the last few weeks. A ceiling fell in at the community house which precipitated some pretty major building works. My unofficial designation is Head of Special Projects, which functionally means that most of the time others do more work than me, but when something major comes up I’m the one with the flex to be point person. Also, I have strong opinions about decor.

We’ve never (part) owned a house before this strange set-up allowed it, especially not an old, ramshackle one. I had no real idea of the level of administrative effort behind the familiar phrase “we’re getting some work done”. I have spent hours of my last few weeks chasing toilets around the country, via emails with eager customer support assistants (“I’m sorry, the toilet that disappeared off the pallet is now lost forever in a dark wooded warehouse and can only be accessed via a magic spell. You must complete this automated form and deliver it by Ogre to proceed. Please rate me by name on TrustPilot”).

All of which was fine, albeit a stretch for my organisational skills. My amazing housemates kept me sane and caught my dropped balls. However, it happened to coincide with someone in our network needing to empty a rental house of furniture at speed. They had generously said it could either all go to a house clearance company, or else be distributed to whoever could make use of it. We know a lot of people who need furniture. Our own is all second hand, and the idea of upgrading some of the shabbier bits was appealing. It sounded simple enough.

This is how I ended up making our house a clearing depot for large amounts of furniture, which we rammed in alongside all the wrong sanitaryware, tools and dustsheets. I have been glued to WhatsApp as friends of friends and clients of local charities and people in church chose stuff, then dithered, then changed their minds. I walked around for a week with a tape measure strapped to my person, for ease.

One item in particular became disproportionately frustrating. It was for a family in tough circumstances who did not, like most people who need free furniture, have the ability to collect themselves. Just an Ikea wardrobe, albeit in decent nick, but it wouldn’t fit down the stairs the one time we had a van. It needed a specific allen key, no, two, and a particular size screwdriver. I only figured this all out after two abortive visits to disassemble it. I am far from a DIY whizz, so only managed to eventually get it down after several hours work with the help of YouTube videos and a lot of swearing. Arranging to drop it off then proved complex, then fitting the pieces in the car, then parking impossible, and at one point my dreams were just toilets and wardrobes, dancing around me, laughing mockingly at my complete lack of basic practical adult skills.

My husband found me on the sofa one evening, tense faced and chugging red wine. He looked genuinely concerned. “What’s the matter?” He asked. I was embarrassed. He’d been sorting and delivering furniture too, doing most of the lifting, and was cheerful and unflustered. I had been snippy, critical, and frankly a bit of a bitch to him. “It’s this f*cking wardrobe” I said. “It would have been exponentially easier to just give them the money to buy a new one and let this one go in landfill. I sort of wish I had”.