“Babs saw all the things she loathed in herself also in her son. His loose skin and wide open heart”
David Bowie said in his song Queen Bitch
She’s so swishy in her satin and tat
In her frock coat
and bipperty-bopperty hat
Tat is good bad and sometimes bad good, unnecessary but a statement none the less.
A Londoner will tell you tut describes items with no aesthetic merit or use or monetary value. In England a Northerner may use tat and a Southerner may use tut to describe the same load of old stuff.
A load of old tat is usually a comment on someone else’s stuff rather than a comment on your own stuff. It’s a way of mocking your friend’s unhealthy attachment to a load of old stuff. It’s often resented by the owner but somehow unmovable. Tat is the gossip of the unconscious. It tells you something you need to know about yourself that’s uncomfortable and that you are probably not ready to hear. The reason will reveal itself eventually but in the meantime the tut appears ominously innocuous.
Ian Dury a Londoner said in his song Clever Trevor
Nothing underfoot comes to nothing less to add to a load of old tut and I ain’t half not half glad cos there’s nowhere to put it, even if I had
Ian is trapped in his tut, helpless, it will just appear elsewhere so he makes no attempt to move it. Tut seems to be an immovable beast.
Tat is also piles of stuff that you are planning to sort or read or cut up. Pile makers are always the less pretty sister, the less athletic brother, chastised, the stuck, the people who want to be someone else, the person always 15 minutes late. Pile makers add to the pile more than they chip away at it. Chipping away at it is always hindered by something that has no relationship with reducing the pile.
Christopher says ‘I need to get stuck into that pile but I’m trying to sell that chair first’
Christopher says ‘I will sort all of that soon I just need to move the glass cabinet’
Christopher says these things as if the pile might fall on the top of him as he starts the vigorous task of ignoring the voice that lists all the horrible things that might happen to him if he throws it away. Christopher avoids sorting the pile anyway he can. Over complicating matters and making the job seem bigger prolongs his time with the pile. Found in the pile are unpaid utility bill, important news articles, several brochures on cancer, an empty Valium packet and an autumn leaf. The pile holds significance in Christopher’s mind because at one point something important was in the pile. It gives everything else in the pile a value it never had before. A torn envelope is suddenly punching above its weight in such a pile. The empty Valium packet could be a reminder of something or does it have a repeat prescription on the back of it? He’s not sure what item in the pile makes the pile significant. This will keep the pile from reducing for a long time. Christopher won’t make the connection, the empty Valium packet has something to do with the proliferation of piles around the house. Christopher’s muscles are like jelly so sorting a pile is difficult. He will be waiting on a delivery of a universal remote control that won’t work before attempting to sort the pile. The connection between the two is not obvious. Perhaps there is. But regardless he will float into slumber and wake up still angry but unable to swing a punch.
Christopher says ‘I just need to get that universal remote control before sorting the pile’
A corner often needs tat. A cane basket, an old suitcase, a few logs, maybe some wool, a few books, hats. This gives a corner a story, it’s now more than a single point where two walls meet. As important as that meeting is.
In two up two down house in a small town in the north of Wales lived Babs and John. Babs put a rusty brass kettle that had never poured a single cup of tea in a fireplace that had never seen single flicker of a flame. John sat in the same recliner every night but couldn’t fully extend the footrest because it would tip the magazine rack over which sat beside the recliner in the only place it could sit unhindered by another object. One leg ached all the time because it was just short of fully extended. John longed to stretch out both legs but had given up worrying about it as it felt like the slightest inconvenience not worthy of discussion. A set of brown rugs folded in equal parts of eight and one wool throw scrolled on top sat beside the magazine rack. These rugs were not meant to warm the knees but rather warm the air. Their tempting warm aesthetic was their main purpose.
In the spare bedroom were a collection of dolls in rows, the biggest dolls at the back cascading to the smallest at the front, with an array of wonky and startled eyes sometimes on the same doll’s face. Each had the roughly the same facial expression but the longer you stared at their faces the more they differed from each other. They could look menacing and they could look kind and sometimes blank. Some were in conversation if you tilted their heads slightly. Babs wasn’t particularly fond of dolls nor was she was particularly maternal. The dolls just warmed up a cold back room. A pink rose quilt covered the guest bed and the light shade and the tissue box on the side table. The quilt was tightly tucked under a springy mattress and it took some digging to peel it back and climb in.
The freezer was packed solid with frozen food. The freezer door was decorated in crayon sketches and magnets with sayings about life’s peculiarities. The door held in garden peas, fish fingers, pizza subs and chocolate muffins. Ice mushroomed around the stiff plastic bags and spiked in furry corners. Babs was ready for any contingency, nuclear war, a long winter. She lived in loose hanging shirts that draped over tight-fitting jumpers, she dressed to cover up her body. Babs hated being fat, the hate was less painful when she ate.
Tat is the accumulation of items that have no functional purpose for the sake of filling a space.
Tat can be a legacy of staying in one place for a long time or it can be a cry for help.
Babs and John’s son ordered something small from a mail order catalogue every week. The arrival of a parcel the next day had nothing to do with the object inside but rather the thrill of the gift. One day the mail didn’t arrive. His cheeks caved in so sharply the universe was sucked into the hole left by his despair. He once bought a miniature clamp. It never left it’s packet. What does a miniature clamp hold, maybe a tea towel. It went on a shelf beside a box of dead matches and an empty bottle of oil covered in glitter and a fluorescent hair band that had lost its elasticity. Sometimes he would clutter his room with so much tat he couldn’t find his bed. He would then re-organise it all neatly and spread it about again. Babs saw all the things she loathed in herself also in her son. His loose skin and wide open heart. His attachment to useless things. He never spent a lot of money, maybe a few dollars. It was about the parcel, the arrival, the unwrapping, the status of receiving. Tat is not worthless to those who accumulate it. All that stuff protects.
Babs watched her son grow larger. She could see he was making the same mistake she did. He smiled excitedly when she put down fish fingers on white fluffy bread lathered in mayonnaise. He helped her clean offices in the city. He sometimes forgot to spray wipe the desks so she would whack him across the head, making his ears pink. She hit him for the small things because she couldn’t hit him for eating the food she put down. That would make no sense. The fat grew around his bones like the tat around his bed. When he was rejected for being too fat to have sex with or too nice to have a relationship with, he’d put all his tat in garbage bags and shove it in a cupboard. As he slowly recovered from feelings of unworthiness the tat returned; new books, long billowy shirts, picture frames and the creep of the contents in the garbage bags from the cupboard back to his room. To free himself of the tat he would need therapy and in his sessions he would need to hate his mother for sending him mixed messages of affection as teenager. Hate his mother for over feeding him. Hate him for slapping his fat leaving a white tattoo on his skin that fades as her hand sways back passed her hip. But he would rather hate himself than hate his mother and let the tat be a small price to pay.
Babs will decorate a bookshelf until she can’t pull out a single book for the tat. She’ll display candles, brass rings, incense sticks, figurines, feathers, tobacco pipes and she will also have a universal remote control that every few years wakes up and changes the channel on the TV next door. She has books on the very top of the book shelf and quite impressively manages to store a small dolls house, a tennis racket cover and Balinese fan collection on top of these books. The book shelf will forever be a cumbersome thing about to topple but she will continue to decorate it with frilly regrets, best intentions and memory catches. And a picture of her son.