Spring clean

The Muse accuses Stacy Solomon of underachieving

Man cannot live on Bread¹ alone. And that’s not just because it hasn’t been on telly for thirty-five years. I would love to spend all of my downtime consuming deeply stimulating television, but that would leave me a gibbering wreck. High concept, thought provoking telly is brilliant and all, but sometimes I just need to point my face at some foolproof images and let them wash over me. And they don’t come much more foolproof than Stacy Solomon. She’s so foolproof she’s happily married to Joe Swash.

Good old Stace has presented Sort Your Life Out² since 2021. A breathtakingly simple take on the home improvement sub-genre, it sees Solomon and her team moving into a family home that’s usually buried in crap, forcing said family to have a good old clear out, and then tarting up the gaff so it’s a lovely space full of ‘zones’ and ‘soothing flourishes’. And it is fucking incredible comfort TV.

You know the schtick by now. There will always be a deeply emotional event, there will always be realisation. There will be tears (often from me; the older I get the more totes emosh I become). Solomon watches soulfully as it all unfolds, flicking her magnificent hair about in a manner that is in no way distracting from tales of early onset dementia or an entire litter of kittens swept up on a tornado.

Credit: C21 media

The major USP of this latest iteration of the home improvement format, is that the family are forced to completely empty their home out before anything else happens. Moving home makes me physically sick, so this part is one reason why I’ll never appear on the show (we’ll get to the main reason soon). Empty the gaff just to put it all back in again seven days later? Are you mental?

With their home emptied, Solomon carts the family and their every living possession off to a big warehouse and makes them get rid of 50% of it. We, the viewers, get to goggle avidly at the scale of the crisis. Stace will reel off the stats in breathless bulletpoints: “John and Jane have got an incredible 751 nick nacks, 260 unopened bottles of gin and 453 human toe bones.”

This bit is always a little bit uncomfortable, because hoarding is a sickness and the inevitable traumatic event is always at the root of it. “Yes, of course I’ve got 300 corn cob pipes, my grandfather smoked a pipe every day until he died of cancer.” But the UK has a longstanding tradition of TV as circus sideshow and we ain’t stopping any time soon. We either stare at the specimens behind the glass or we sit and face the reality of how fucked up our society is.

While the family are confronting their deepest insecurities and foibles, Stace is making their house less of a devastating grief pit. But this is no one-woman show, she has a team who all get to do their thing. Dilly (what’s that short for, Dilliam?) Carter oversees the de-cluttering, very much playing the bad cop to Stacy’s good, while Iwan Carrington takes care of deep cleaning and adding evergreen solutions. Finally, all-action Rob Bent redesigns tired old rooms and creates exciting new spaces for all concerned. Rob is loud and plays with power tools, so absolutely yes - my inner child fucking loves him.

Sort Your Life Out, like so many of its forebearers, always ends on a happy note. The format demands a wholesome dénouement. The family move into their newly lovely, decluttered home and everything is all sweetness and light. Stacy ticks off the the wins in a breathy voiceover: “The kids are now in separate rooms, complete with their own Harry Potter under-stairs sleeping pod each. Jane has a lovely painting nook where she can go and get away from her awful family, while John’s shed has been fully converted into a windowless wanking den complete with chainmail hammock.” See? Wholesome.

It’s handy to have a show like this in your rotation. When you’ve both had a challenging day (The Muse overseeing her empire; me getting my seventeenth job application rejection), Plurbirus or Severance would be a little too heavy. Even a bit of frivolous trivia is too much. Sometimes you want to sit there quietly, occasionally looking lovingly at your other half and saying something like “See? I might snore like a freight train, but at least I don’t need Stacy Solomon to help me throw away dozens of jars filled with old teeth.”

Even while plonked in front of something so insignificant, the differences between The Muse and I still occasionally rear up. It is nearly always the warehouse-based clear out centrepiece that causes a split. Which brings me to the main reason why I’ll never appear on Sort your Life Out. You see, while I am prone to collecting clutter, The Muse is not. My darling wife is a decluttering maniac. She makes Mary Kondo look like Mr Trebus³.

While watching the warehouse clear out segments of Sort Your Life Out, The Muse adopts a steely glare. “Why have they got thirty woks? They don’t need thirty woks.”

“I know, dear, that’s why Stacy Solomon is helping them out.”

Sure enough, it’ll be revealed that the family dog was lost in a devastating wok-quake, and the family have been drawn to collect woks ever since. Stace will persuade them to let their woks go, and by the end of things they have got rid of twenty-seven woks.

The Muse looks up archly from her Kindle. “They don’t need three woks. One. They need one wok.”

When The Muse and I first met, I had a CD collection. Hundreds of albums, some stone cold classics, rare single releases. My life’s work. Yes, it was in boxes, but that pile of plastic had been with accumulated over twenty years. The Muse didn’t like it, and it only took one house move for her to zone in on the storage boxes under the bed. My dreams of a study lined with music were dashed; not long afterwards, my life’s work went on Music Magpie⁴ for a couple of hundred quid.

The DVD collection went next. I dug in on that one, and negotiated a wallet solution that meant only the boxes were thrown out. The movie collection is intact ad rightly so, because Airheads, Judgment Night and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors will never, ever be on Netflix and must be preserved for posterity. My attempts at diplomacy actually saw us combining our DVD collections into one hugh, multi-walleted behemoth. We can never divorce, because the legal fees to divvy it up would be financially ruinous to both of us.

When my parents moved out of the family home, I was summoned back because of some cardboard boxes in the loft. When opened, they contained all of my books from my teenage years. First edition Stephen Kings, obscure Dean Koontzes, an alarming number of Shaun Hutson paperbacks. My eyes lit up. I looked at my darling wife.

“Do you need them?” she asked.

Four little words was all it took for the battle to be lost. Of course I didn’t need them, I’d managed without them for years, we didn’t have a loft I could transpose them too, and a pile of cardboard boxes in the corner of the living room is a poor look. I found a collector to take them off my hands.

These early skirmishes were a sign of things to come. My wife is the Queen of the Spring Clean. I married Mary Poppins on amphetamines. As soon as the evenings lighten, she starts scanning around like a terminator looking for its next target.

The garages where we live are being re-roofed at the moment. The other day, I mentioned over dinner that the guys tearing up the old roof meant I’d need to sweep it out when the work was done. She locked on. Like, I could actually see her blood-read HUD vision as the reticule stopped scanning the room and pinned me in place.

“Great,” she said. “It’s been ages since we cleared the garage out.”

The garage is my domain, so the implication was clear: you’re cleaning the garage out, hairy. Fortunately, I’m still unemployed so at least I can do it on a Wednesday. And hey, who doesn’t love a trip to the dump? Me, actually. All those Stigs of the Dump judge my soft writer’s hands.

The Muse is a Vinted lunatic. Not a day goes by without a trip to our local pick up/drop off point. She’ll wander in while I’m writing, the picture of innocence. I will look up, trying to not pull a Jack-Nicholson-in-The-Shining face.

“What’s up?”

“Have you walked Peanut yet?”

“Nope. Why?”

“Just, erm, wondering if you’d mind going via the Post Office.”

“Not at all, why?”

I, of course, know what’s coming. And, of course, my phone will light up as the dispatch emails fly in, while she presents me with a Santa’s sack of treats for Vintees up and down the land. Show don’t tell, as the saying goes.

She is, perhaps, too good at this. The other day I was out galivanting when I got a message:

Just a heads up for when you get home - I’ve done some cleaning/tidying in the kitchen. It’s a bit messy (work in progress) but new stuff arriving tomorrow so it won’t be like that for very long.

I appreciate that sort of heads up. Although I’m two years into my personal enlightenment, had I got home at 10pm and seen my favourite room in the house upended, the old emotional dysregulation would’ve kicked in for sure.

Yes, The Muse had taken it upon herself to deal with ‘that’ kitchen drawer (we’ve all got one) and ended up rejigging the entire room. As head chef, I had to impose some logic on the herbs and spices, but it kept her busy enough the next day that I got a few hours to tinker with my bastard fiction⁵.

Except, my darling wife is so efficient that she tidied the kitchen so completely and effectively that she forgot where she put everything. As we were compiling our weekly shopping list in the kitchen the other day, she pulled open the formerly ‘party-time’ drawer, peeked inside and went “Matches? Yep.”

“Erm, matches nope actually,” I replied, before opening the newly created ‘functional-kit’ kitchen drawer and revealing three boxes of matches⁶ neatly tucked into their own little storage container.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I tidied the other day, didn’t I?”

Stacy Solomon’s job is probably safe for now.

---

Thanks for reading. My ego is huge but fragile, so please show some love on your way out. Restack the piece to help people find it, or leave a comment if anything landed well with you. Or just bang the like button before you go, even that helps the algos find me. Coin in my Ko-Fi fund is the ultimate praise. Cheers, hope to see you again soon.

---

1. Bread was a seminal British sitcom created by Carla Lane. It ran on the BBC from 1986 to 1991. At the height of its powers it was pulling in over twenty million viewers.

2. Every time, without fail, I get the urge to call it Sort Your Fucking Life Out. It just fits so perfectly.

3. Edmund Trebus was a compulsive hoarder who became famous when, in his eighties and living alone, he was featured in 1999’s A Life of Grime.

4. Music Magpie was an online car boot sale that would take your old CDs in return for about 12p per item. They are inexplicably still going, having pivoted to tech at some point in the last fifteen years.

5. I still hate saying the word ‘novel’ despite the fact that’s what it is. It’s like I’ll scare it away.

6. Neither of us smoke (she hates it, I gave up six years ago) but we are partial to a scented candle or twelve.