A guy came round to mine this week with a knife, and knelt down on my kitchen floor. Casually, he scraped the floorboard with the flat blade, and I, kneeling down then beside him, gasped. I had a go with the knife too after that, stripping the top layer of darkened floor, revealing the raw, pale wood inside, and he went and got his machines then, and started to sand the whole room, giving advice about water damage and mopping suggestions throughout. I wasn’t entirely listening. I was thinking about two things.
First, about the floorboards themselves, and Noel Gallagher, and how, as a teenager he was embarrassed to bring girls back to his house because they couldn’t afford carpet. And when he moved to London he called his mum to tell her, did you know, in London, they don’t have carpet on the floor, they just polish the floorboards? And how both of them reeled at the southeners’ utter foolish lunacy. Second, I was watching the floor change, and so quickly, too – I was thinking that this was the experience an exfoliating microdermabrasion facial promises, the instant sloughing-off of time and wear to reveal the true you beneath the skin.
The sanding was brutal and effective – the next morning even the light in the room felt different, reflecting off the freshly yellow floor, sort of embarrassingly hopeful. It inspired me. So I decided to do similar to the rest of the house – to shave the top layer off everything; a kind of radical spring clean.
There was a time a few years ago, during those prickly lockdown months, when I would spend entire mornings carefully propagating small plants, or repotting larger ones and turning them towards the sun. When garden centres reopened I trotted there gleefully, and my windowsills are still heavy with pots. But looking around today with newly sharpened eyes, instead of delicate plants, trembling and green, I see needy shirkers who can’t keep up with a modern city lifestyle. I start by tweaking off a few yellow leaves, cutting the odd monstera root. Then I lop off the top of a 6ft cactus, and trim back some irritating twigs, and then – then I go wild. Nurture? I barely knew her. The little brownish plants which seem to come back to life every two weeks, I compost them. Same with the bigger ones, the ones that give off an air of desperation, making such a song and dance about staying alive, hanging on by a single tendril, moping in a limbo of their own making, back to the ground they go, rest in peace. Some I simply bin. Just: bye!
It’s with a similar mix of guilt and emancipation that I approach my children’s drawings. Years ago we covered a wall of our kitchen with cork, and merrily pinned up every thick-handed scribble our then-toddler daughter produced. It grew, out from the wall, six sheets deep in places – family portraits with a cat the size of Wales, others so rich in psychological subtext it shows either great ignorance or terrible arrogance that we were content to display them. Then, as she learned to write, there were love notes, and hate notes, and a story written in lockdown about a terrible monster that ate old people, and pictures which, at some point, started battling for space with paintings by a new toddler, soon to be covered with educational and medical reports by her about him after she taught him how to count, or how to avoid banging his head when jumping on the bed. I get a bag, and I start ripping. Ripping them down, stuffing them in the bag, with a rush of something. A rush of, like drinking the second drink, or stepping off an airplane into a new dry heat. A change in state.
And then I move around the house like an animal or machine, sanding off that invisible layer of wood or life from every room I enter, without tenderness or pause.
There was no real cleaning to this spring clean, in fact, everything was left far messier, and some things were spilt. But how liberating, to strip a home back, to scrape away the surface – I am a person who thrills equally at the peeling of sunburn and at the conversations with friends who have recently started therapy, where a similar blistering sometimes occurs. And as someone who struggles with their sentimental attachment to things, it WAS therapeutic, making space on the windowsills, acknowledging, respecting the limits of my ability for responsibility, and making space on the wall, letting time go, allowing for a future.
After applying a lacquer, the floor-sanding man warned us that the boards would feel a bit rough underfoot for a few days. He talked about the day’s sanding process as if describing a kind of trauma, the wood had been through something violent, he said – but reassured us that soon it would feel smooth again, and then, that soon after, we’d barely even remember he’d been.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
