Monday 10 April 2017

What's The Opposite Of Kondo ?

I have to go to  Briekantiek , then I could completely de-Kondo my life . They sell furniture , jewellery, pitchforks , old tiles , garden furniture ,
 


 
holy statues , paintings , straw hats , wood burning stoves of every vintage , rugs , door knobs , giant candle sticks ... That's right . It has absolutely nothing I need , let alone could use .  
 
Though if I bought the " industrially unique" ( their words , not mine ) crane built in the early 1900's   , and just about visible here behind the red truck , I could free
 
 

 
 myself from the tiresome neccessity of climbing up and down the stairs from street level .
 
Apartment block one-up-manship ... being lifted onto one's balcony by one's very own personal antique crane . Perhaps I could have it monogrammed ? Attach a crest from the huge heaps of decorative ironwork in Briekantiek's barns. A crest and monogram ? A bit much , perhaps ?
 
Well ,my new neighbour has prayer flags and a Buddah ... I'm going to have to  pimp up my balcony somehow , till the seeds from those tiny wild sweetpeas that I kept from last year's crop  come out . Once they do , it'll be a bit like Sleeping Beauty's castle . They twine their way round everything at a mile a minute .
 
 And I've got a little starter kit for growing radishes from the supermarket's Little Gardeners promotion this year , only radishes are one of the very few vegetables I don't like ( fennel being the other one ) . A major investment is called for , obviously . 99 cents for a packet of seeds from Lidl won't make me self-sufficient but will be fun . Courgettes perhaps ...they grow themselves apparently . And if I chose yellow ones , it'd add a touch of Bling .
 
It's all right , I'll calm down soon ... it's just that Friend and I went to the Collectors Fair in Utrecht at the weekend and all those endless stalls of stuff   does this to me every time . By the end of the day coming home with three soup tureens , a 1930's nightie , a moth eaten toy monkey , five egg spoons and a donkey-shaped velvet teacosy begins to seem reasonable , though obviously we're all avoiding the anatomically correct plaster cast of a diseased lung .









5 comments:

colleen said...

That haul sounds not unfamiliar. Especially the tea cosy and monkey...

molly said...


Ms. Kondo would have some harsh words for you! After reading her a few years ago I decided to DO it. Quite a lot of water has flowed under the bridge and still I have not DONE it. But lately I've been hit with an industrial strength urge to spring clean and more progress has been made in two weeks than in the previous two years!
The thought of those sweet peas twining themselves around everything makes me swoon...

Debra She Who Seeks said...

BUY THE CRANE. BUY IT NOW!

Liz Hinds said...

Such restraint. I am impressed.

Chillies. they grow like crazy.

You can't have a crest without a monogram. It goes without saying.

Lucille said...

Those wrought iron gates are the very thing I am looking for. I wonder what the postage would be.