Getting A Clue

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Champagne and confetti—hurray for the wonderful Catriona McPherson, who just won the coveted LEFTY award for best humorous novel! Yay! And I don’t even think she’s left-handed.

She is endlessly hilarious, and brilliant, but you know, we all have our personal lacunae. I, for instance, still have the tiniest bit of trouble keeping track of left and right.   And sometimes the simplest thing will be revealed—and when I mention it, everyone is baffled. You didn’t KNOW that? they’ll ask. Like yesterday, I was wondering why sometimes we refer to stomachs as  tummies. The moment I asked myself the question, myself answered. But seriously, I’d never thought of that before. And the Morton Salt slogan, when it rains, it pours? Took me decades to realize what that meant.

Anyway. Sometimes personal revelations take a bit of time. As our dear Catriona has also learned.

The Life Changing Magic of Getting a Clue

  by Catriona McPherson 

Sometimes writing is work. Sometimes it really isn’t. Lexy Campbell moved into her houseboat, moored in the slough behind the Last Ditch Motel, at the end of SCOT FREE. In SCOT AND SODA we’re busy making it her own. I drew floorplans and sketches, while she arranged her larger possessions and stowed her smaller ones. (I also made a few visits to the real “Creek House”. It’s on the Hyde Street Pier, at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, open to the public and absolutely irresistible to anyone who loved dolls’ houses as a wee girl.)

Lexy’s houseboat isn’t spacious: the kitchen is titchy – her American friends feel that anyone with a fridge that size is basically camping; the wardrobe space will never cope if shoulders come back; and the bathroom- Actually, that’s very practical. You automatically wash the entire place every time you have a shower.

Lexy is coping very well with the space restrictions. She’s organised, methodical and clutter-free. I’m quite clutter-free too. But organised? Methodical? Here are three examples of my housekeeping genius. You tell me.

I’ve got two and a half baths. (Like Lexy, I always wondered about half-baths. Wouldn’t the water run out?) There are cupboards and shelves in all two and a half of them. For six years, I kept the toilet paper supply in another room entirely. Then I realised that was daft and decided it should be kept in a bathroom. For another year, I wondered which one. Finally, I had a brainwave. Buy three lots of loo roll and store one in each place with a loo. Tah-dah!

Then there was the thing with the mosquito screen. I’ve got two opening windows in my bedroom. Only one has a screen on it. (I could get a screen for the other one. I never have.) The screen happened to be on the window not very near the bed. So, in the summer, I dragged the bed out into the middle of the room, nearer the screened window. One day, about eight years in, I was washing the windows and, as usual, I took the screen off to do so. Brainwave! Put the screen back on the other window! The one near the bed! And never drag a lump of Victorian mahogany halfway across a room again! Eight years.

Even that’s not as bad as the mugs. I’ve got too many mugs. I’ve got huge tea mugs and more modest coffee mugs. For storage I’ve got some hooks and a shelf.  For nine years, unless there were some in the dishwasher, I couldn’t store them all. Now I can.

Did you see why? After nine years, I realised that big mugs are bigger and take more space on the shelf, whereas small mugs are smaller and take less. And every mug takes the same number of hooks: exactly one. So now the big mugs hang up and the small mugs go on the suddenly roomy shelf. Nine. Years.

Marie Kondo is not shaking in her slippers.

If you want to make me feel better about all of this, you could confess your own long-delayed penny-drops. Or you could pass on your favourite household organising tips.  You know there’s a fair chance I need them.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: We had a cleaning person once who moved EVERYTHING in the kitchen—to a way more logical place. The coffee stored NEAR the coffee maker, canyouimagine? All the forks in the silverware holder facing the same direction? Whoo.  And if you turned the wastebasket to face the other direction, it didn’t show under the counter. WHY didn’t I think of that?

So how about you, Reds and Readers? Any recent “Duh!?” moments?

Catriona McPherson is the multi-award-winning and best-selling author of historical detective novels, set in Scotland in the 1930s and featuring aristocratic sleuth Dandy Gilver. She also writes darker - that’s not difficult - contemporary standalones, including the Edgar finalist THE DAY SHE DIED. After eight years as an immigrant in northern California, she started the Last Ditch trilogy, written with love and no judgement (honest) about her new home.  SCOT & SODA  (“frightfully funny” – PW) comes out on Monday.

Find Catriona online: Facebook, Twitter,  www.catrionamcpherson.com.