I’m on the slippery slope to living like Stig of the Dump. Can a £12 towel rail turn things around? | Emma Beddington

II have often referred to the cardboard waste box where I dispose of my worn but not dirty clothes, craving, I think, the purifying fire of public shame. Who lives like this? How do other people not end up with clirts – it’s downright dirty – floorwear (apologies for the double portmanteau)?

I felt like “broken windows” – the American police term for apparently minor neglect acting as a gateway to crime or, in my case, shrugging at the march of entropy. At my age, it’s a slippery slope in this empty nest. Does moisturizer matter? Why bother with a plate for whatever scrapings from the fridge I call lunch? What’s wrong with a little useful soil under my nails? One time I failed to floss and the next thing I know I am Enough of the dumpliving in a dump.

A solution finally appeared at a car boot sale last weekend in the form of a rickety but functional wooden towel rack. Some light negotiation, 12 pounds and minimal tidying later, I was a new woman, or at least a woman with folded clothes on a piece of furniture, box banished.

Spurred on by this unfortunate step into functional adulthood, I tried to deal with some other broken windows in my life. I started by washing the lowest sedimented layers of the laundry basket, clothes I barely remembered owning, roasted the seven almost liquid peppers festering in the fridge, picked up a piece of mysterious plastic that was on the floor from the last monarch, set up an appointment for a hoof trim at the farrier – sorry podiatrist – and bought a moisturizer (my face is definitely a broken window).

But then I ran out. The graveyard of refrigerated jars, the sea of ​​flexible plastics for recycling, and the time-critical tax emails remain unresolved, as does everything else. I’ve been here before: it’s like the time I bought a decorative filing folder and for two glorious weeks put all my receipts in it and didn’t hide the post under a pillow. The burst of energy borrowed from a purchase promising to solve my problems only gets me so far: there are so many windows and they all seem cracked.