I found another article here on decluttering.

These are always worth a read, especially at this time of year when you suddenly get the urge to throw everything out. 

I'm not sure that it really has anything dramatically new to say, butit has some advice that is worth repeating, such as: "You don't have to be ruthless, but you do need to be dispassionate. Don't feel guilty about getting rid of something just because somebody gave it to you, or you spent a lot of money on it."

Harder said than done when you're a tightwad, of course. And the DH just a couple of weeks ago found a use for some things I sold two years ago - oops. 

More important perhaps is the link to Terence Conran's page on decluttering (I like the pictures here - it's how I fondly imagine I would live if I actually had some organisation and no cats). Although, again, the advice is familiar, one phrase did strike me:

"Anything that you are keeping on the off chance that it might either come in useful or become valuable one day. What is more useful and more valuable is the space that it is occupying"

Aha. Space is indeed useful and valuable, especially in Britain, where people live in the smallest houses in Europe, on the smallest plots of land. For instance, few people can really afford luxuries like a spare bedroom any more - far better to put a clic-clack in the dining room and turn the spare room into an ensuite - at least that way you get to actually use it. 

Maybe what we all need is gigantic lockups to put all our junk in, then when we're dead, all our rellies can come round and exclaim at the crap - or, as I did last night - cry out in wonder at the rackds of vintage clothing batty-as-a-fruitcake Cornelia Bailey had managed to amass in her Jacobean pile in Country House Rescue. I would have given my eye teeth to trawl through those two rooms, I tell you what...

I found some tips online the other day about selling your property in the current market. 

The piece was written for sellers abroad - particularly Spain - but there's some good general advice for anyone who's trying to move house but can't shift their property at present. 

Space
Few matters are more important to buyers than a ‘feeling’ of space, says the author. This is as important to someone seeking a studio flat as a person wanting a luxury villa.

He advises that you look at photographs in interiors magazines and notice that what they all have in common is a lack of clutter. Surfaces are generally clear and furniture is minimal.

To duplicate this look, remove everything that in any way reduces the ‘sensation’ of space, he says, including possessions that are dear to you. "Few people will ever buy your property because of your belongings," he points out, so be ruthless - put your stuff in storage if you have to.

Light

"Make sure your property is filled with as much natural light as possible. A lack of plentiful natural light strikes deeply into the subconscious, always producing a negative sensation.

"Get rid of any heavy velvet or net curtains, however inconvenient this may be in the short term. Make sure that windows are clean, heavy curtains are pulled well back and that any nearby vegetation or trees do not darken your house."

In this house, because of our 2ft thick walls and tiny windows, we use extra-long curtain poles, cream curtains, and tie them well back from the windows. As we are not overlooked, we also only use curtains for warmth, only winter and only in the living room, and even here, in summer, they come down altogether. In London, where we lived almost on the street, we used stick-on film on the windows to blank out vision in the lower half, and cream Roman blinds - no clutter, and infinitely variable light.

Deliver the dream

"A few well placed bottles of champagne, a full wine rack and some yachting/golfing magazines can provide a high life ‘feel’ to a room," says the author. "Fresh fruit and flowers always add colour and the smell of freshly ground coffee can be effective."

The magazine and wine idea is a good one - its something we use when we're 'staging' interiors for photography but I wouldn't have thought of it for selling a house.

Cleanliness

"Few things are more off-putting than properties that are unclean, messy, greasy or smell of cigarette smoke, damp or pungent incense sticks," the author advises. "Keep your house well aired and centralise all extraneous mess in one discreet area preferably away from the main body of the accommodation."

Oh Lord, why don't more people do this? It is so basic, and yet I think people can't see their own filth when they're living in it. Smokers are particularly guilty, as they simply can't smell their own smoke, nor realise what a brown, hideous tinge everything they own has about it. I vividly remember moving into a flat in Kilburn and the brown water that ran down the walls as I washed the previous owner's nicotine off everything.

Low maintenance

"Prune trees and shrubs, clear your garden of weeds and undergrowth, power wash terraced areas and paths and make sure that your garden looks easy to maintain. Also mend broken gates, fix dripping taps and ‘sticking’ doors or windows.

"Repaint scuffed areas of paintwork to provide an impression of care – if a buyer sees small areas of neglect he will suspect that your house has more profound problems."

These tips should be tattooed on the eyelids of everyone who's trying to sell in France at the moment - most of their properties look awful, and a potential buyer couldn't help but be put off the second they turn into the courtyard. Some have broken-down old cars in the driveway, most have moss and weeds everywhere, and few Brits seem to spruce up their paintwork and plant geraniums in windowboxes, the way the French do. 

Warm

"If you have a viewing, make sure that your property is warm."

Well doh, you would think. But people are stupid...

Lived in

"Few properties are more difficult to sell than unlived in, empty shells. ‘Dress’ your property so that it feels like a permanent home and not somewhere that is temporary or deserted. Always retain furniture in your property together with pictures, curtains, towels and the minimum obvious objects to give the impression that someone is living there all the time."

This is obviously written for holiday home owners, so its relevance to UK sellers would be minimal, but lived-in vs tidy is a hard balance to strike.  Too many Brits regard their property as a house and not a home, and paint and furnish it to suit the next buyer, stripping it of all individuality.

Property surroundings

"The impression of a buyer is not restricted to just within the boundaries of your property. Rubbish piling up close by, a badly potholed road, excessive weeds on pavements and discarded junk all provide a negative impression.

"It may hurt to clean up the mess of others (or do the work of the town hall!) but it is essential to ensure that the immediate environment of your home looks good and not neglected. So, get out there and fill in the worst of the potholes and regularly get rid of any junk and rubbish!"

Easy enough to do here - my local commune would be delighted if we slung a couple of buckets of gravel into the pothole that regularly opens up in our driveway (there's a source underneath), but harder to do in the UK, I would have thought.

Individuality

"If your property is identical to many others close by, try to give it some aesthetic individuality such as painting it a different colour, having window boxes of colourful flowers, adding wooden shutters or perhaps some pretty water feature in the garden beside an imaginative shaded seating area. Make sure your property stands out and has the capacity to leave a positive and distinctive memory."

Our Dutch friend Gerry was always a big fan of 'My pink half of the drainnpipe' but until he came to Britain he didn't know it was a REAL phenomenon. In London, our half of the drainpipe was black, if memory serves. It can be hard, though, to make a mid-terraced house look individual when it's surrounded by others exactly like it. 

Be relaxed

"Always give the impression to any potential buyers that you are perfectly relaxed and content. Never appear nervous, never over-sell and never mention anything derogatory about your home."

Well LOL. The last time I sat in someone's house to ask about selling her property, she gave me a massive list of everything that was wrong with it. Admittedly, I wasn't buying, and she may have been unguarded, but her near-hatred of her own home certainly came over in the conversation.

"Have a plausible reason for wanting to sell and make sure that reason has nothing to do with anything that could be considered a negative about your property (‘we would like an en-suite’, ‘need a bigger garage’, ‘the garden takes too much effort’, ‘we hardly use the the pool’ etc)."

I know only two people who've cracked this - one who sold because her husband died and another who sold because she had become too disabled to continue living in the property. Both are reasons that any buyer would understand and sympathise with. If we ever sell this place, we'll probably just say we're moving closer to family.

For more tips, visit the link above. 

We've got friends over for dinner tonight. What am I? A masochist?

Periodically at Montcocher, we decide to have an 'eat the store cupboard' week. This is a week when we try not to buy anything at all from the supermarket but instead clear out the fridge, freezer and store cupboard. Very sensible, then, to decide to have new friends over for the very first time at the end of such a week, when we're practically down to dog biscuits and mustard. 

It's not as if the house isn't also looking like a pile of shite, after a long winter of woodburning. There is dog mud right round the sofa and cat mud on every bleeding surface (we had a major storm last night and the cats have trodden it in everywhere). So why do I add to my woes by having to whip up a three-course meal from stuff we just happen to have in?

Still, necessity is the mother of invention, they say, and I'm quite pleased with the menu I've managed to cobble together for tonight. 

* Vodka-tonics or a red pineau (all we've got in - all the Xmas booze is gone, most of it courtesy of just one of our guests). 

* Starter: meli-melo of lardons, roquefort, dates, cornichons, salad, chutney, celeri remoulade and crab apple jelly in a chilli dressing. This is a sure sign that we've run out of crisps. Also ham, smoked salmon, prawn crackers...

* Main course: Thai coconut chicken and chickpeas, marinated in garlic, black pepper and olive oil, with turmeric, nuoc nam and cinnamon. Fried rice with red pepper and onion. Steamed green beans. Frankly, it's either that or spuds. Or the dead rabbit that's in the freezer and which I don't have time to defrost. Or pasta. Mostly, pasta. I can stretch the two fillets of chicken to four of us by using masses of chickpeas. 

* Dessert: red wine and vodka syllabub with cinnamon almond praline topping and lavender shortbread. Syllabub, along with sack posset, is becoming my go-to dessert these days, working on the dictum that even if the rest of the meal's shite, a good dessert is all people will remember.

Actually, I think more people would make syllabubs if they knew just how easy they are - you just whip together generous quantities of cream, sugar and alcohol until it goes fluffy, spoon it into a glass, stick something in it like a cinnamon stick, a twist of lemon or a bay leaf (today it's bayleaves on account of, I've GOT bayleaves) and leave it in a cool place overnight. The sugary creamy topping separates from the liquid base, and I'm serving it in some purple glasses that look kinda pretty.

I didn't have any sherry, madeira or port to make it with, so I just used red wine and extra sugar, then added a bit of vodka. I also didn't have quite enough cream to fill up the glasses, so I made some almond praline this morning to top them off, and I made the shortbread after lunch today - they all went very flat, so they're more like biscotti really, which is probably better. 

* Coffee with pistachio halva. I knew that halva would come in handy at some point. I always buy it when Lidl gets it in, as it's the only sweet thing the DH doesn't like enough to raid the cupboard. Halva, like fruit cheese, lends a slight touch of exoticism to coffee, though - and it's been one of my standbys since I was a student. 

Right, only hoovering, floor washing, dusting and cleaning the loo to do before they get here...

Yesterday was the anniversary of the introduction of food rationing in the UK, and what a shock to find that Marguerite Patten, doyenne of cookery writers, is still alive and kicking. I've got a couple of her cookery books.

My parents both served in the war, but for those in civilian life, food rationing is one of the things they remember with the least fondness. Bad enough having bombs dropped on you, your kids sent away for safety, your spouse training in some army camp, without food itself being difficult to obtain. 

Well, that's the received opinion, but in my family, it's taken with a pinch of salt. One reason that food rationing was introduced, let us remember, was that when the general mobilisation took place, so many men were found to be unfit for service due to malnutrition.

The pale, spavined, rickety product of a 10-year economic depression - a time when many people suffered from anaemia due to lack of meat, there was no NHS so ailments went untreated, and most people did grinding manual labour - came as a shock to the authorities.

They instantly instituted a rationing programme to bring Britain UP to standard, as well as prevent waste and food hoarding. For my family, as for many other working families, they had never eaten so WELL.

Certainly the diet was boring. Without our massive empire to exploit, Britons suddenly had to grow our own food instead of nicking it from people we'd conquered, and we'd halfway forgotten how to do it. We learned quickly, though, and God bless the Ministry of Food's efficiency in ensuring its fair distribution and that the population didn't starve to death.

I searched online for articles about the subject yesterday and found a few of those gosh-wow-how-DID-they-manage-without-microwaves? type features so beloved of the tabloids as if we all slept on swansdown. In this kind of feature, people follow the wartime diet for a week, suffer the ghastly pangs of Diet Coke withdrawal and end by wondering how on earth people coped without mooli and garangal.

Well, they didn't all live on powdered egg and Spam, I tell you what. A lot of them did what my family did: they poached, they kept chickens on any spare bit of ground, or a pig out the back; they planted potatoes; they learned to stretch meat; they grew their own herbs, they made bread pudding and Poor Knights of Windsor. In fact, that's how I grew up too, in the 60s and 70s, eating pheasant full of buckshot, jugged hare poached by my dad's workmates and fish caught by the local Jehovah's Witnesses (don't ask me why - they had their own boat).

One writer, eating a Woolton pie (a kind of shepherd's pie with root veg instead of meat, shown at top left) proclaimed it as tasting like cheesy slime. No it bloody doesn't. A properly cooked Woolton pie is really tasty, but you have to know how to cook, not just take the top off an M&S ready meal. Ye gods. Have Britons really turned into such a bunch of wimps? Two rashers of bacon a week? A bar of chocolate a week? That's all we eat in this house to this day. 

Oh well, enough rant. It seems a far cry from then to Good New Days of today, when we chuck a third of our food in bins and leave it to rot.  So much cleverer than our ancestors, drowning in a sea of our own plenty...

If you do even the most cursory study into what you, personally, can do to save the planet and benefit your health at the same time, it becomes uncomfortably apparent that you should probably give up meat.

All in all, meat is a pretty bad idea. Animal fats are the biggest cause of coronary heart disease in the west. Cows and pigs bred for meat use up a huge amount of land that could be put to agricultural use. Obtaining meat involves slaughtering the animal, to its inevitable suffering. Acres of Brazilian rainforest are lost every day in order to put land to meat production - mainly for populations that are already obese. 

Well, we all know the math. 

The problem for the average Brit is that our whole cuisine is founded on meat. And most of us enjoy meat. There is something about getting your gnashers round a nice juicy steak that a carrot burger just can't match. But at the same time, most of us don't relish the idea of the animal suffering so that we can eat it. So we do that fancy mental two-step that enables us to carry on doing something we know at heart is morally reprehensible.

Our Christian heritage is also a problem. Unlike some other religions, there has never been a moral imperative in Christianity to avoid meat in the modern era. Fish on Fridays is an idea long-gone, and for many centuries, access to meat for many people was so rare in any case that choosing to avoid it was not an issue. People ate meat whenever they could get their hands on it.

That situation is markedly different in other parts of the world. Jains in India, for instance, abstain from all meat and fish on the principles of non-violence. They also don't eat eggs; honey; any vegetable that 'bleeds' like blood when it's cut; root vegetables, in case insects are killed when they're harvested; or after sunset - in case insects are fatally drawn to the lamplight. One way or another, I sometimes wonder what Jains actually have left to live on. 

However, the rich tradition of vegetarianism that results from these strictures, and is found elsewhere in the East, particularly wherever there is a Buddhist tradition, results in a fabulous vegetarian cuisine - something we lack in the west. Eating veggie meals becomes positively enticing when a big Thali is laid out before you.

I would therefore advise anyone who wants to cut down their meat consumption to look to other cuisines for vegetarian inspiration, especially Indian. And if not Indian, then Mexican, or Spanish, or French, or Italian - all of these traditions have excellent veggie meals, such as pizza, ratatouille, chilli, guacamole etc, which are eaten simply as part of the cuisine, not as poor substitutes for meat-based meals, as so much British vegetarian cuisine seems to be. 

You could start by having one veggie day a week. In this house, it's usually Wednesday - the mid-week meal - and we'll generally have something like a ratatouille or a non-meat chilli, or a chickpea curry.

Even if you never progress further than this and remain a meat-eater the rest of the week, you have just dramatically reduced your carbon footprint - and that's something worth aiming for.