Order and organisation. Location unclear.

Almost everyone has one.

The chair.
The armchair.
The rocking chair.
The bench.
The corner.

The place where clothes end up when they’re neither clean enough for the wardrobe nor dirty enough for the laundry basket.

They exist in an administrative no-man’s-land.

A textile waiting room where no one is ever called.

Eventually, so many clothes accumulate that the chair can no longer legally be considered a chair.

And just to be clear, we are not talking about the magic table, the magic floor or the magic chair.

You know. Those places where things you leave lying around simply disappear by magic.

That is an entirely different phenomenon.

And probably an entirely different column.

I have always had an extraordinary ability to create systems.

I like systems.

Systems provide a sense of control. Of order. Of being the kind of person who labels her storage boxes and knows exactly where the warranty for the toaster is.

The problem is that my systems have a tendency to reproduce.

One system quite quickly develops one or four subcategories. The subcategories then turn out to require systems of their own, and before anyone has fully understood what happened, I’ve established a small government agency in my home.

With an unclear mandate and an organisational structure no one fully understands anymore.

This happens more often than I care to admit and almost always ends with me being considerably more exhausted than I was when, filled with energy and optimism, I began the project.

My husband occasionally questions my systems.

Had he asked three subcategories ago, I could have explained them.

Or at least defended them.

But by now the system has collapsed under the weight of its own system, and I’m standing there with four storage boxes, a label maker and absolutely no idea what the original problem was.

This reached new heights when I had a brilliant idea.

Back to the clothes.

I like wearing different clothes. Which means I constantly have garments that have been worn, but haven’t finished being worn.

The trousers I’ve had on for a few hours.
The top that can absolutely manage another day.
The shorts that in no way deserve the washing machine yet.

They will be worn again.

Soon.

The problem is where they’re supposed to live in the meantime.

In our bedroom, there’s a bench at the foot of the bed. Instinctively, one might assume that this is precisely what such a bench is for.

Apparently not.

Because if you put clothes on it, the bedroom looks messy.

One could, of course, ask why I have a bench at the foot of the bed in the first place if I don’t want anything lying on it.

Because it’s pretty?

Because it’s practical?

I genuinely don’t know.

Most likely, I saw one in an interiors magazine where someone with limestone floors and three-metre ceilings had casually draped a throw over one corner.

And thought: that’s what we’ll do.

The difference, of course, is that nobody ever seems to have lived in those bedrooms.

People live in my bedroom.

With trousers.

So I needed a system.

And then it came to me.

The idea.

I would clear out one of the bottom drawers in the chest of drawers and use it for clothes that were going to be worn again within the next few days.

Not clean.

Not dirty.

In transit.

A layover drawer.

I was unreasonably pleased with myself.

It was elegant. Discreet. Well thought out.

The clothes now had their own transit department. Somewhere to wait pending a decision on their final destination: wardrobe or laundry basket.

The bench was clear.

The bedroom looked tidy.

And, most importantly, I had once again proved that almost anything in life can be solved with the correct storage solution.

Every evening when I went to bed, I folded the day’s reusable clothes and placed them in the layover drawer.

It worked beautifully.

For a couple of days.

Then it got hot.

Suddenly, my wardrobe consisted mainly of bikinis and summer dresses. I worked from the garden, walked the dog, and the days blurred together in that particular way summer days do.

The layover drawer remained.

Quiet.

Discreet.

Fully occupied with carrying out its mission.

And I forgot it existed.

A few days later, I needed my black shorts.

They were gone.

I looked in the wardrobe.

On the bench.

In the laundry basket.

In the bathroom.

Eventually, I started looking in places where no pair of black shorts could reasonably be expected to be, but which still have to be checked once you’ve been searching for long enough.

Because after a certain point, you stop looking.

You start investigating.

I knew they were somewhere in the house.

I was certain.

I am, incidentally, always certain.

This is rarely any guarantee that I’m right.

But certain I am.

Eventually, I gave up and had to accept that a pair of black shorts had somehow left our home without informing me of their destination.

A few days later, I was standing in the bedroom one evening holding a pair of trousers.

They had been worn.

But they weren’t dirty.

They could be worn again.

Soon.

And somewhere in the back of my brain, a small administrative officer cautiously began shuffling through some paperwork.

Hang on.

Didn’t we have…

A drawer?

The layover drawer.

I pulled open the bottom drawer.

There they were.

My black shorts.

Neatly laid over.

Next to them were my workout leggings.

Which I had also been looking for.

“AHA! SO THAT’S WHERE THEY ARE?!”

My husband was already in bed. He slowly lowered his phone and looked at me.

Not surprised.

More like a man who understood, on some level, that he was now going to have to hear about a sequence of events.

“What’s happening?”

“I found my black shorts!”

He looked at me.

“Okay.”

“The ones I’ve been looking for for days.”

“Where were they?”

And this was the point where I had to tell him about the system.

The layover drawer.

The idea.

The clothes that were neither clean nor dirty.

The bench.

The whole arrangement.

He listened.

Then he sighed.

“We’ve talked about this. You have to stop creating systems that you forget about and then create another system. It doesn’t work now that you’re burned out.”

My first instinct was to object.

Because there was nothing wrong with the system.

Quite the opposite.

The system had worked perfectly.

I didn’t want to see the clothes.

So I created a place where I wouldn’t have to see them.

Then I didn’t see them.

And forgot about them.

It’s difficult to argue with that kind of success.

So the layover drawer has now been decommissioned.

After a brief but intense period of operation.

The clothes are back on the bench.

It doesn’t look particularly interiors-magazine-worthy anymore.

But I know where my black shorts are.

Usually.