Devolution of the Species

Man's Search for Furniture

I have spent the last few days engaged helping my mother perform a ‘death cleaning’. It is not, as I had imagined, the cleaning out of furniture, possessions and other assorted junk that one does after a death, but the cleaning done pre-death, to lessen the burden on your relatives once you do end up shuffling off. Apparently, it’s a Swedish thing. It is amazing the amount of detritus that accumulates around a human being over the course of the years. It reminds me of a snag in a river, catching the debris that drifts past until the original snag is no longer visible, hidden beneath the great mound of sticks and flotsam, unrecognisable. How any of it was ever deemed necessary at the time is a mystery. The most spectacular discovery was a long kept, ‘moustache cup’, a small teacup with the addition of a shelf inside the lip designed to keep your moustache out of your tea. It was apparently very popular with Victorian gentlemen. There are no Victorian gentlemen in my family.

‘Olive oil,’ I said to my wife, knowing immediately it was the wrong answer to her question, ‘What do we need for the new house?’ She was thinking furniture, I was thinking necessities. Eventually, we made a list of furniture and whitegoods, purchased them online and then sat around our empty unit waiting for things to arrive.

For the last three years I have rented furnished apartments, a decision borne of my abhorrence of lugging furniture from one place to another. What I had forgotten when I had started to make the list, was the pain associated, not with moving furniture that you already own, but purchasing it in the first place. The furniture industry is a rort. I am not sure what other industry gets away with charging you for a product with little idea of when you will receive the purchased goods or what condition it will be in when it eventually arrives.

Last week the fridge finally turned up unannounced, a month after we had paid for it. Life without a fridge to keep things cold was a daily nuisance, requiring forethought and planning, an 8 litre esky and daily runs to the shop for a small bag of ice. Meals were planned and cooked knowing that leftovers could not be kept. Milk was bought with careful consideration of how many cups of coffee we intended to drink that day. Being forced to live out of an esky did help us dilute our cold storage life to the essentials; milk, butter and pecorino.

And in this time of scarcity, red wine showed its true value and why it has existed for thousands of years. It asked for nothing more than to be poured and consumed. Most importantly, wine requires no dining table. I say importantly, because I have so far received and returned two dining tables; one arrived damaged and the second impossible to assemble with the parts provided. Hopefully it will be third time lucky.

Scientists are currently studying a battle that is going on in the suburbs of Sydney between the human and avian residents. Cockatoos have worked out how to access garbage bins and man and bird are now locked in a kind of arms race where the humans are trialling new ways to keep the bins closed and the birds are coming up with new ways to open them. By all accounts the birds are winning, coming up with solutions faster than the humans. And I am not surprised.

Reflecting on my home-furnishing ordeals, I can’t help but think how badly evolved I am as a human, of how many things I need just to survive in some kind of comfort. To sleep I need a plush bed and pillows. Plus sheets and pillow cases and doonas and doona covers. I need a table and chairs and knives and forks and spoons and chopsticks just to feed myself.

This need for things points to the devolution of man as a species. While many rightly fear that soon the world will no longer be fit to inhabit, I fear that we are already no longer fit to inhabit the world. No wonder the cockatoos are beating us at our bins.

The Moustache Teacup

Last week I was using a self-service checkout at the supermarket. I placed a carrot on the scale, the screen lit up with every orange-coloured product in the shop, and then I could tap the picture of a carrot – no typing needed. I am sure that this is some spectacular advancement in customer experience, but it left me wondering, are we now no longer required to even know the name of the things we are buying?

I do wonder where all this will end. There is a cost to comfort, to shortcuts, to not having to know, to owning all of these things that provide some temporary relief from the world rather than force us to confront it, to learn, to adapt. Soon the cockatoos will be coming into our houses, drinking from our moustache teacups, and we’ll be powerless to stop them.

In the meantime, I am still waiting for the third dining table to arrive, allen key at the ready. I am not sure how long my experiment with furniture will last. Maybe on the next move I will burn it all and just keep the esky and some ice. When it is time to start my own death cleaning, I like the idea of having nothing to worry about but a bit of pecorino, a bottle of olive oil and some good red wine.

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