The romance of maintenance

There is a wonderful line in How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand,

the romance of maintenance, is that there is no romance to maintenance

I think that we have a different relationship with things now. Traditionally life was all about maintenance, for the very rich, they simply had more people to do the maintenance for them. A great country estate, was a machine to provide a certain lifestyle, with gardeners maintaining a high maintenance image of what the country should be, with housekeepers maintaining the house in all its splendour, with the kitchen staff creating complex and demanding dishes.

These people were never idle, they were always busy, trying to grow pineapples using manure to provide heat, polishing silver cutlery every day, locking doors, lighting lamps, tending fires.

For everyday people there was also a huge amount of maintenance, keeping yourself clean, polishing shoes, ironing shirts, blacking lead, waxing the floor.

The standard notion now is that all this work was drudgery, and we are well rid of it. Even for the very rich, it seems absurd that you would maintain a house, or even a garden in such a labour intensive way. I suppose we view the labour as demeaning, and the tasks as pointless.

We live in a period of temporary abundance. We still enjoy the benefits of cheap oil, which is after all, just that oxymoron of free energy. We have the billions of China slaving away to provide for our every need, regardless of how trivial. All the while we are drowning ourselves in cheap debt, while the more long-sighted minds of the East are slowing becoming our creditors.

We can all recognise, that for something we really like, for something we enjoy owning, maintenance can be a form of veneration, what else is the point of waxing a car each weekend, or polishing shoes daily, or obsessively keeping your garden weed-free. In its way, these things are an expression of your love.

Maintenance need not be mere drudgery, it is only a chore when you see it as pointless and meaningless. I really enjoyed having a wood stove, and although it was vastly more work than just switching on a fire, it was work that I enjoyed. It was tactile, you could smell the ash, and smoke, you took the ash outside where it was cold, and came inside to light the fire, which slowly warmed the house.

We are always looking to impose some meaning onto our lives. In our relationship with our possessions we can simply acquire more and more, better, more impressive possessions, or we can choose sufficient and useful possessions, that we are then commited to look after and maintain, and even to dispose of wisely.

If we are to cope with the coming environmental pressures, then we will need to be prepared to move to a different way of looking at possessions. Rather than simply adding more and more possessions to our lives, endlessly getting rid of the tired and shabby, which they all too quickly become, we need to focus on choosing wisely, and then looking after what we own.

This is not such a different attitude. After all, it is how you would treat people, you don't simply get a flashy wife, then trade up to a new model, you choose wisely, look after and nurture.

Over the past week I have been working in the garden in the evenings, and rather than finding the gardening a chore, as I did when I had to try and squeeze the whole garden into a weekend blitz, whenever the weather was fine, I have really enjoyed it. It is fine to just start in a corner and work through all that needs to be done. Knowing that what does not get done will always get done the following evening. After a day spent at my desk, or sitting on a train, some time alone, pottering in the garden, is precious, all the more precious for being a contrast with whatever else I have been doing.

I suppose that a garden is your little microcosm of what the world could be like, your own private section of some larger perfection, even if the larger perfection just exists in your own mind. There is nothing more natural than to tend your garden, to nurture and maintain.

Having more time to maintain the garden, I now feel less compelled to simply go out and spend money on plants. When you don't have the time, it is tempting to just throw money at something, so that you think you are doing something. Someone who never goes fishing, buying the magazines to read on the train. People who never do any cooking, spending thousands on a kitchen.

There will always be some tasks that you are not good at, have no interest in, do not enjoy. The world should include people who will work for you, nowadays it always seems cheaper to buy new, than to simply maintain, but if we start to make a conscious decision to keep things for the long term, to pay for their upkeep, then the costs, are just the costs. The cheapest way, is not always the best.

Maintenance is an expression of our place in the world, part of our relationship to it, tending and nurturing, like the parent, the gardener or the shepherd. It is the responsibility of ownership, rather than just the selfish pride of it.