‘On every page I was amused, uplifted and moved by the

possibility for grace and serenity hiding in the smallest

domestic moment. Chuck out all your self-help guides to
gratitude, mindfulness and finding meaning. This book
is all you need.’
Charlotte Wood, award-winning author of The Weekend
and  The Natural Way of Things

‘Every failed domestic goddess will rock with laughter.’

Shona Martyn, Spectrum editor, Sydney Morning Herald

‘Sweet, wise, and very funny, with genuinely useful

household advice for the most half-arsed pickle-forkers
and wisteria-murderers among us.’
Danny Katz, author and columnist

‘A glorious account of how the little things of life are, of

course, the big things.’
Richard Glover, radio presenter and author of Love, Clancy
Fenella Souter is an award-winning feature writer whose
work has appeared in magazines and newspapers over many
years. She is a former longtime editor of Good Weekend, in
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and, more recently,
has also worked as a radio producer, co-producing several
documentary series for ABC Radio. Her domestic alter-ego
has appeared in columns under the pen-name of Dusty
Miller. She lives in Sydney with her partner.
 F ENELLA S OUT ER

How
to Fake
Being Tidy
and other things
my mother never taught me
First published in 2021

Copyright © 2021 Fenella Souter

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational
purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has
given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

A catalogue record for this

book is available from the
National Library of Australia


ISBN 978 1 76087 844 3

Illustrations by Georgia Draws A House

Internal design by Bookhouse, Sydney
Set in 11.5/17.5 pt Didot LT Std by Bookhouse, Sydney
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press, part of Ovato

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It requires skill, time, dedication and empathy
to create a home that everyone enjoys and
that functions well. Above all else, it is an act
of immense generosity to be the architect of
everyone else’s well-being. This task is still mostly
perceived as women’s work. Consequently,
there are all kinds of words used to belittle this
huge endeavour.
D EB O R A H L E V Y,
T H E CO S T O F L I V I N G: A  W O R K I N G AU TO B I O G R A P H Y

I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and

regretted most of them, but never the potatoes
that went with them.
N O R A EP H R O N ,
H E A RT B U R N
 Contents

Introduction xiii
Why it’s easy to be ruthless with other people’s stuff 1
Is the hostess gift still a thing? 5
When Ellen came to stay 9
Trapped in the boutique 13
Love, chokos and the whole jam thing 17
GRANNY BARRY ’S CHUNK Y M ARM AL ADE 20
A man about the house 23
Shame file of a chronic returner 27
Hello stranger 31
When does a loan become a gift? 35
Killing my wisteria 39
The cat goes AWOL 43
The trouble with house guests 47
A whiter than white wash 51
When you smile, the world . . . feels sorry for you 55
The cookbook throw-out that wasn’t 65
A passing infatuation with fat 69
BROCCOMOLE 72
Is there a place for a pickle fork? 73
How to fold a towel 77
It’s hard to love a leaf blower 81
‘Where’s the personality?’ 85
When opportunity knocks, don’t answer 89
Is it okay to clean someone else’s house? 93
The day I didn’t notice 37,000 bees 97
Jane and I make a cake 105
JANE’S FRUIT CAKE THAT BECA ME A WEDDING CAKE 108
An idiot loses their shopping 111
How to get into a fix 115
HUMMUS WITH SPICED L A MB 118
Fifty shades of red 120
Losing my mother 124
Unexpected paws at the table 135
Travel panic runs in the family 139
How to be your best self while doing nothing 143
Does tradie know best? 146
‘I think you’ll find that’s permanent’ 150
Twenty-four-hour non-party people 154
The case of the disappearing magnolia 158
LEMON DELICIOUS PUDDING 162
PASSIONFRUIT CREA MS 163
I attempt being clean and tidy 164
Three hours of being a basket case 168
How to make a bed 172
The ‘servant’ question 176
Voyage round my kitchen 180
CHOCOL ATE DESSERT CAKE 189
A fine (washing) line between pleasure and pain 191
A pressing issue 195
Listless in suburbia 199
How I know I’m not a princess 202
The pantry clear-out 206
ROASTED TOM ATO SOUP 209
My worst meal 211
Cleaning the silver 215
The precious gift of giving the wrong thing 219
The art of packing (if only I had it) 223
I get a lesson in taste 227
The manly art of romance 232
I attempt to become a domestic icon 238
BASIC CHICKEN TRAY BAKE 244
INDIAN ALMOND CHEESECAKE 247
The curse of restaurant pity 248
A groaning table, or give me a negroni 252
So long, Spoon 256
Acknowledgements 259
 When does a loan
become a gift?

Annie said she had done a thorough, if discreet, inspection of

her cousin’s house when she’d visited six months ago. No sign
of her vintage designer lamp. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there,
I told her. Maybe it was off being repaired, or taking a rest in a
cupboard somewhere. Maybe, Annie said, but if it was in a cup-
board, why had her cousin taken up her offer to borrow it in the
first place, or, if she’d found she didn’t need it, why hadn’t she
given it back? Had Annie made it clear it was on loan, I asked.
She wasn’t sure. Three years had passed, after all.
We replayed the handover scene, with Annie playing Lady
Bountiful and me playing the grateful, forelock-tugging cousin.
She couldn’t remember whether she’d actually worked in the
word ‘lend’, or perhaps even specified a period of time. She
thought she might have just said something like, ‘Here, you’re
welcome to use this old thing that I’m not using’. It sounded

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 How to Fake Being Tidy

as if she’d been so busy making a generous gesture of a classy

lamp to their unfurnished house that a certain ambiguity about
its ownership—present and future—had crept in.
We agreed it would be difficult to ask after its whereabouts.
Embarrassment all round. Or at least, that’s how Annie felt until
the cousin announced she and her partner were moving again.
Annie made up some lame excuse about refurnishing a room
and how that particular lamp would be really handy if it just so
happened they no longer needed it. Not that she wanted to be an
Indian giver, and not that that phrase was acceptable anymore,
of course, legacy of North American colonists who had stolen a
continent and so forth. But the cousin knew what Annie meant,
didn’t she. So, the lamp.
‘What lamp?’ the cousin said.
‘The silver one with the long neck,’ Annie said.
‘Doesn’t ring a bell. Are you sure it was us you gave it to?’
‘Yes, I  am,’ Annie said. (It wasn’t like lending someone a
paperback, Annie told me later.)
‘Oh, well, you know how I am about household things,’ the
cousin said, with a wave of her hand. ‘I don’t take much notice.
Can’t say I remember it. But I’ve got a nice IKEA one you could
borrow until the end of November when we’ll be settled.’
Look at it this way, I said to Annie, who was still upset about
it when we met. For whatever reason, Annie hadn’t wanted it,
so perhaps it would help to imagine it was still there with the
cousin, doing its duty, and to remember that she, Annie, still
didn’t need it.
‘I don’t even think it’s about the lamp itself,’ Annie said,
trying to work out why she was so annoyed. ‘I gave them this

36
 When does a loan become a gif t?

lovely thing—lent it to them, whatever—and I wanted them to

appreciate it and they haven’t.’
Jess had a similar story. She’d once given an antique side-
board she no longer needed to a friend who had always admired
it. When Jess visited only a week or two later and asked to see
how it looked in its new space, the friend admitted she’d sold it
on Gumtree.
‘It must have been her plan all along,’ Jess said, shocked. Did
the friend look guilty or mention sharing the profits?
‘She did look a bit shifty but no mention of actual money.’
Jess had had the chance to sell the sideboard herself. She
couldn’t be bothered. I imagine that’s how the enterprising friend
saw it. Still, we agreed it was pretty brazen not to at least offer
some of the takings. It’s delicate, this lending/giving business.
As the giver, the warm glow of your own benevolence should
cancel out any bossy interest in the object’s future. Somehow it
doesn’t. Not entirely. It’s theirs, but still sort of yours. Will says
the person doesn’t have to consult you about its future because
they now own it . . . because you gave it to them.
And even if you’re convinced it was always only on ‘loan’,
there’s probably a statute of limitations on asking for stuff back.
I’d say no more than two years, if you’re going to do it at all—
and you’re never going to come out of a ‘recall’ looking good.
Even so, I have heard of people shamelessly demanding back
beds, sofas, fridges, cars, pictures, pepper grinders, whatever,
as much as twenty years later. It’s not quite the same as a bio-
logical parent ripping an adopted child from the bosom of its
adoptive family, but it’s on a similar spectrum of tangled owner-
ship claims. Weirdly, your discarded things often become more

37
 How to Fake Being Tidy

desirable when someone else has them. Is that about loss or just
better curation?
Liz told me she has a policy of never wearing any item of
clothing any friend has given her when she’s with that friend.
‘You’re rocking it and they see how great it looks and then they
regret giving it to you,’ she said. ‘So you get into this reverse tug-
of-war where you’re saying, here, have it back, and they’re going,
“No, no, I couldn’t, I gave it to you . . . but it is really, really nice,
isn’t it?”. Then they look wistful and kind of martyred.’
So if you’re going to give, give. If you’re going to lend, don’t,
unless you can live without it forever. And if you’re the receiver,
have it on display when the former owner comes to visit, but not
looking too good.

38
 Killing my wisteria

The arrival of autumn has reminded me I appear to have killed

our 25-year-old wisteria. Knotty and gnarled, it spreads across
the pergola in a thuggish way and at this time of the year we’re
usually raking up rustling carpets of crisp brown leaves, a new
batch falling daily to give the task that Sisyphean edge. This
year, however, the Great Fall happened in late December; that
is, midsummer. All wrong. I came out one day to find the leaves
looking sickly. Soon they were falling in their hundreds.
It is possible the murder weapon was the stuff I put on the
surrounding pavers to deal with a bad case of mould. Then again,
it could be Nature. Borers. Root rot. Root suffocation. All poten-
tial suspects, according to online gardeners, as I tell Will, my
chief accuser, who seems to have forgotten about the presump-
tion of innocence.
When I say ‘killed’, it’s more like gravely wounded, with a
possibility of a miraculous recovery, especially if a saint drops

39
 How to Fake Being Tidy

by. The vine did manage to hold on to a small amount of leaf

throughout summer as well as sending out suckers like crazy.
It is also quite hard to kill a wisteria stone dead. I’m hoping
the change of season will give it time to regroup. Through my
study window, I can see autumn already at work. One of its high,
blustery winds has set the trees fluttering and bowing as if hon-
ouring some invisible potentate, a great swaying wall of greenery
undulating in a Mexican wave. It’s not Vermont in the fall but
it’s stirring all the same.
It reminds me there was a time in the district when none of
those trees—or the wisteria—was here to mark the seasons. Back
in the days when Kev was around, our former next-door neigh-
bour. He liked it like that. Treeless.
Kev was a veteran of the street in those years and he paid us
a visit the week we moved in. He was a burly man with a fierce
red face. After a few pleasantries, like ‘I’m from next door’, he
got straight down to business. First, he wanted us to know we
were making too much noise hammering with a nail punch, pre-
paring the old timber floor for sanding. Please desist, he said,
although he didn’t use those exact words. Fair enough. It was
6 p.m. after all. Then we came to the main item on his agenda.
‘I hope you’re not one of that lot that like trees, are you?’ Kev
demanded. By ‘that lot’, we took him to mean yuppie-greenie
scum. (How had he sniffed us out so quickly? We didn’t even own
a late-model European car back then.) It was hard to know what
to say. As it happened, we did like trees. We’d probably even be
planting some, since the garden was empty—in fact, the whole
suburb was short of greenery—and the summers were blistering.
He pointed over the fence to his yard.

40
 Killing my wisteria

‘Patsy and me like to keep it neat,’ he said. And a square of

concrete is neat, no denying. But did he mean his place in par-
ticular or the neighbourhood as a whole? He glared at us while
a Hills hoist squeaked in the breeze and his air conditioning
unit pumped a furious roar into our yard. Did I mention he and
Patsy owned a pit bull? We settled for a neutral smile that could
suggest we agreed trees were wildly overrated. Even shrubs were
unacceptable to Kev. He couldn’t do much about anything we
planted on our own property, but when we planted a few grevil-
leas on our side nature strip—nowhere near him—it was the thin
edge of the wedge. He reported us to the council. The council
came and pulled them up. I don’t think that would happen now
but it did then.
I do understand Kev. He was from a generation more con-
cerned with gutters and foundations and neat edges than with
‘urban habitats’ or the benefits of green shade. He made a hobby
out of hosing concrete. Nature was something to be discouraged.
Only a fool would leave her to her own devices. Foliage came with
a single, malicious purpose: to make a mess for tidy homeowners.
He did have a point. The inner city has plenty of examples of,
say, a darling little blue gum sapling planted in a tiny courtyard.
What a surprise when it grows into a forest giant, darkens every-
one’s backyard in winter and crashes down branches in a storm.
But to hate trees on principle? That showed a poverty of spirit.
I’d like to think a bitter man always loses his campaign, and
Kev lost his. He moved away. The neighbourhood now flour-
ishes with trees, a mixed bunch but cherished, softening the
hard lines, cooling the streets, showcasing every hue of green,
cleaning the air, feeding the earth, forging a powerful bond with
us, in their noble, wordless way. The wisteria might be confused

41
 How to Fake Being Tidy

about the season but the tops of the eucalypts across the way are
whipping in the cool winds and bright carpets of fallen blossom
are swirling around the street’s crepe myrtles. Autumn, and the
trees are singing themselves to sleep.

42
 Jane and I make a cake

It’s the mention of pillars that worries me. They appear in the
first email Jane sends about her crazy idea to make her son’s
wedding cake. It seems I’m to be the mad professor’s assistant
in this enterprise. Neither of us has made a wedding cake before,
although we’ve both seen some, from a distance.
Jane lives in England, the happy couple live here, and she
would be arriving only three weeks before the big day. Not much
time in which to make two fruit cakes—big enough to feed 70
guests—speed-mature them somehow, and then have a go at some
classy icing and decorating that looks vaguely professional. On
the other hand, it’s quite a lot of time in which to fail and not
have a cake ready for the wedding.
‘Have you thought of ordering one from an actual wedding
cake maker?’ I write back.
‘Well, that would be the easy way, of course,’ she replies a little
tartly. ‘But he has asked me to make it. He likes my fruit cake

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 How to Fake Being Tidy

and that’s what he wants. So, basically my usual Christmas cake,

I thought, one large, one small, with home-made marzipan, royal
icing, some sort of decoration, gumnuts and oak leaves, a stencil
with their initials, and pillars.’ Right. Piece of cake.
A little research shows that Jane and the groom’s choice of
fruit cake and royal icing is either heart-warmingly old-fash-
ioned or boldly ahead of its time. As far as I can tell, pillars
on wedding cakes had their heyday around the time Princess
Elizabeth married Phillip Mountbatten, in a largish affair in 1947.
Then, pillars featured in a critical supporting role, groaning under
a four-tier, chalk-white and Wedgwood blue monster that weighed
in around 226 kilograms and made the Parthenon look mini-
malist. The fashion now is for offset cakes, tall as top hats, sitting
directly on top of each other, supported by invisible dowel rods
(who knew?). Fruitcake is rare and even the royals seem to have
abandoned royal icing. I see Harry and Meghan—back
when they were still royals—opted for
organic Amalfi lemon and elderflower
cake, incorporating the ‘bright flavours
of spring’, slathered in buttercream.
I explain all this to Jane, but,
English traditionalist that she is,
she’s unmoved by the faddish,
Americanised, Markle-ised
world of naked icing and deco-
rative macarons, faux marbling,
or salted caramel ganache-filled
sponges. Once she’s here and
we go shopping, she doesn’t
bat an eyelid when the young

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 Jane and I m ake a cake

woman in the cake equipment place says: ‘We do get asked for
royal icing occasionally, but only at Christmas and those cus-
tomers are usually over 80’.
Jane is a self-acknowledged perfectionist. I am not. Yet I’m the
one who overthinks the whole business, spending my evenings
watching videos of skilled professional cake makers wielding
palette knives like Italian plasterers and plunging hollow dowel
rods into cakes with all the precision of someone from Grey’s
Anatomy performing an emergency tracheotomy. There’s a whole
world out there of tricks and techniques, weird gear, helpful
women, and ghastly overdone confections.
Jane watches none of these and is alarmingly calm and con-
fident. Bloody hell. Doesn’t she realise how much can go wrong
with advanced piping, for example, or sugar flowers?
‘He says he wants it to be rustic so it’s not as if it has to be
one of those kick-arse confections with all of that,’ she says. Now
she tells me.
The cakes themselves, made to an old Christmas cake recipe
of Jane’s, turn out nicely, fragrant with fruit and brandy. Jane
makes the marzipan from scratch using a Nigel Slater recipe—
so superior to the bought stuff and dead easy, it turns out—and
layers it on thickly. (We use the leftover bits in a plum crumble.)
With their marzipan layer on, the cakes look smooth and parch-
ment-y, although rather mound-shaped, I can’t help noticing.
‘Are they meant to be slopey like that?’ I say, the helpful friend.
The days pass while we wait for the marzipan to dry. Jane
learns that Australian kitchens have cockroaches and marauding
ants to guard against. When it’s ready, Jane whips up some royal
icing—made with icing sugar, egg white, lemon juice, and some
glycerine so it won’t set like concrete—and we plaster it on with

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 How to Fake Being Tidy

palette knives as best we can. Rustic is definitely the effect. And

kind of slopey.
‘If you say that again, I’m going to have to kill you,’ Jane says.
On the night of the wedding, the two-tiered cake—dowels! cake
boards! waxed real flowers! stencil!—was a triumph and tasted
amazing. Even people under 40 loved it. True, it was low (and
kind of slopey), and the decorations were simple, but the thing
was, it meant something. For the groom, it was a token of his
mother’s years of cooking and nurturing; for Jane, it was a gift
to a wedding she had been far away from in the planning. I also
learnt a few things. One, as paediatrician Dr Spock famously
advised new mothers, ‘You know more than you think you do’.
Two, in a room buoyed with happiness, everything will be all
right on the night, so don’t sweat it. Three, something made with
love and faith will always beat something made only to impress.
Four, it is easier to buy a cake.

JA N E ’ S FR U I T C A KE T H AT B EC A M E A
WE D D I N G C A KE

This has become my new Christmas cake. It’s beautifully rich and moist,
and the prunes and apricots make for a delicious twist on conventional
fruitcake recipes. It’s very good even without marzipan and icing.

Ingredients
500 g mixed dried fruit (raisins, sultanas, currants)
200 g pitted prunes, roughly chopped
200 g dried apricots, roughly chopped
100 g glacé cherries, halved

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 Jane and I m ake a cake

100 g mixed peel

2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp orange juice
125 ml whisky, dark rum or brandy
225 g butter, softened
225 g soft dark brown sugar
1 tbsp finely grated orange rind
1 tbsp finely grated lemon rind
2 tbsp orange marmalade
4 eggs, at room temperature, lightly beaten
300 g plain flour
2 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp grated nutmeg
pinch of salt
100 g blanched almonds, to decorate (optional)

Method
Combine the mixed fruit, prunes and dried apricots, glacé cherries and
mixed peel in a large bowl and add the lemon juice, orange juice and
whisky, rum or brandy. Stir well. Leave overnight in a cool place.
Heat the oven to 140°C. Line the base and sides of a 23-cm round
cake tin, or a 20-cm square tin, with a double thickness of greaseproof
paper or baking paper.
Cream the butter and sugar together. Beat in the orange and lemon
rinds and marmalade. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after
each addition.
Sift together the plain flour, spices and salt. Add the dry ingredients
and the soaked fruit alternately to the butter mixture, mixing well after

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 How to Fake Being Tidy

each addition. Pour the batter into the prepared cake tin and level off
the top. Bang the tin on the bench once, to settle the contents.
Decorate with the blanched almonds, pressing them lightly onto the
top (skip this step if you’re planning to ice the cake). To help prevent
the edges from burning, wrap a double thickness of greaseproof paper
around the tin, making sure it rises about 10 cm above the top of the
rim, and secure with string.
Place on the lower shelf of the oven so that the top of the cake is in
the middle, and bake for 1 hour, then cover with a loose sheet of foil and
bake for a further 3 hours or until a skewer comes out clean.
Wrap the cake, still in its tin, in two thicknesses of foil and leave to
cool overnight. Remove from the tin and wrap the cake in two layers of
greaseproof paper and some foil or beeswax wrap and store in an air-
tight tin for up to 2 months.

110