This is where shops like The Holding Company come in, and one popular storage solution it offers is baskets – “the comfort food of the Nineties”, as Walter calls them. “Baskets are very efficient, they stack and store very well, and are also very homely. People are addicted to them, and come in and buy 10 at a time.” Also favourites are suction products for the bathroom. What this does is take up space for the things that really do matter, and so what you really need to do is have that cathartic experience and get rid of them.
I hope my book really expresses that it’s OK to do that – that you shouldn’t surround yourself with your mistakes. We get fat, we spill things on our clothes, and we buy things that we never put on our bodies because they don’t suit us, but instead of giving them away we torture ourselves every day by looking at them. Our parents or grandparents have taught us to `waste not want not’, and therefore we are very reticent to give things away or throw things away. Eight more shops are planned for the UK and Europe within the next five years, supported by mail order catalogues. “Space is at such a premium, and so there is a huge market for what we do,” she explains. “Nobody can have enough space, and nobody can be organised enough.”So it’s not just a matter of selecting a few choice storage items – without the right attitude to start with, you’re on a hiding to nothing. Walter recommends that, in starting to reorganise your home, what you really need to do is set yourself small projects.
“If you look at undertaking the entire task of reorganising your life in one go,” she warns, “you’ll never do it – you’ll be immobilised by fear. You need to take two hours here and there, to clean out, say, the kitchen cupboards, and when you’re done, reward yourself – do something that makes you feel good about doing it.”You see, Walter thinks it’s not really in the British nature to be organised. “We are a nation of hoarders,” she says, “and that’s really based on the fact that there was a war fought outside our front door. I work six days a week, 11 or 12 hours a day, and I want the time I have to be quality time. I don’t want it to be spent frustrated at not being able to find something in my house.”Walter was in shopping centre development for 14 years in her native US, before marrying an English lawyer and settling in London in 1992.