HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Champagne and confetti—hurray
for the wonderful Catriona McPherson, who just won the coveted LEFTY award for
best humorous novel! Yay! And I don’t even think she’s left-handed.
She is endlessly hilarious, and brilliant,
but you know, we all have our personal lacunae. I, for instance, still have the
tiniest bit of trouble keeping track of left and right. And sometimes
the simplest thing will be revealed—and when I mention it, everyone is baffled.
You didn’t KNOW that? they’ll ask. Like yesterday, I was wondering why sometimes
we refer to stomachs as tummies. The
moment I asked myself the question, myself answered. But seriously, I’d never
thought of that before. And the Morton Salt slogan, when it rains, it pours?
Took me decades to realize what that meant.
Anyway. Sometimes personal revelations take
a bit of time. As our dear Catriona has also learned.
The Life Changing Magic of Getting a Clue
Sometimes writing is work. Sometimes it
really isn’t. Lexy Campbell moved into her houseboat, moored in the slough
behind the Last Ditch Motel, at the end of SCOT FREE. In SCOT AND SODA we’re
busy making it her own. I drew floorplans and sketches, while she arranged her
larger possessions and stowed her smaller ones. (I also made a few visits to the
real “Creek House”. It’s on the Hyde
Street Pier, at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, open to the public and
absolutely irresistible to anyone who loved dolls’ houses as a wee girl.)
Lexy’s houseboat isn’t spacious: the
kitchen is titchy – her American friends feel that anyone with a fridge that
size is basically camping; the wardrobe space will never cope if shoulders come
back; and the bathroom- Actually, that’s very practical. You automatically wash
the entire place every time you have a shower.
Lexy is coping very well with the space restrictions. She’s organised, methodical and clutter-free. I’m quite clutter-free too. But organised? Methodical? Here are three examples of my housekeeping genius. You tell me.
I’ve got two and a half baths. (Like Lexy,
I always wondered about half-baths. Wouldn’t the water run out?) There are
cupboards and shelves in all two and a half of them. For six years, I kept the
toilet paper supply in another room entirely. Then I realised that was daft and
decided it should be kept in a bathroom. For another year, I wondered which
one. Finally, I had a brainwave. Buy three lots of loo roll and store one in
each place with a loo. Tah-dah!
Then there was the thing with the mosquito
screen. I’ve got two opening windows in my bedroom. Only one has a screen on
it. (I could get a screen for the other one. I never have.) The screen happened
to be on the window not very near the bed. So, in the summer, I dragged the bed
out into the middle of the room, nearer the screened window. One day, about
eight years in, I was washing the windows and, as usual, I took the screen off
to do so. Brainwave! Put the screen back on the other window! The one near the
bed! And never drag a lump of Victorian mahogany halfway across a room again! Eight
years.
Even that’s not as bad as the mugs. I’ve
got too many mugs. I’ve got huge tea mugs and more modest coffee mugs. For
storage I’ve got some hooks and a shelf.
For nine years, unless there were some in the dishwasher, I couldn’t
store them all. Now I can.
Did you see why? After nine years, I
realised that big mugs are bigger and take more space on the shelf, whereas
small mugs are smaller and take less. And every mug takes the same number of
hooks: exactly one. So now the big mugs hang up and the small mugs go on the
suddenly roomy shelf. Nine. Years.
Marie Kondo is not shaking in her slippers.
If you want to make me feel better about
all of this, you could confess your own long-delayed penny-drops. Or you could
pass on your favourite household organising tips. You know there’s a fair chance I need them.
HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: We had a cleaning
person once who moved EVERYTHING in the kitchen—to a way more logical place. The
coffee stored NEAR the coffee maker, canyouimagine? All the forks in the
silverware holder facing the same direction? Whoo. And if you turned the wastebasket to face the other
direction, it didn’t show under the counter. WHY didn’t I think of that?
So how about you, Reds and Readers? Any recent
“Duh!?” moments?
Catriona McPherson is the
multi-award-winning and best-selling author of historical detective novels, set
in Scotland in the 1930s and featuring aristocratic sleuth Dandy Gilver. She
also writes darker - that’s not difficult - contemporary standalones, including
the Edgar finalist THE DAY SHE DIED. After eight years as an immigrant in
northern California, she started the Last Ditch trilogy, written with love and no
judgement (honest) about her new home. SCOT
& SODA (“frightfully funny” – PW)
comes out on Monday.
Find Catriona online: Facebook,
Twitter, www.catrionamcpherson.com.
