My Chair Hasn’t Been Sat On Since June

There is a chair in my bedroom.

I know this because I bought it.

I vaguely remember choosing it because I thought it would look lovely in the corner.

Somewhere to sit with a coffee. Somewhere to read. Somewhere to throw a towel while I was getting ready.

That last bit turned out to be prophetic.

Because nobody has actually sat on the chair for months.

The chair has a job now.

It holds clothes.

Not dirty clothes. That would be ridiculous. Dirty clothes have a basket.

Not clean clothes either. Clean clothes belong in the wardrobe.

These are a third category of clothing.

Not-dirty-enough-to-wash-but-I’m-not-putting-them-back-in-the-wardrobe clothes.

And apparently they require their own furniture.

I looked at the chair this morning and realised I could no longer actually see it.

Jeans.

A cardigan.

Two tops.

Something black that could be leggings or tights but I’m not prepared to disturb the ecosystem sufficiently to find out.

A bra.

Another cardigan.

Why are there two cardigans?

I’m a naturist.

Surely I should have considerably less of this problem than everybody else?

That feels like one of the great uninvestigated contradictions of naturism.

I can spend half the weekend perfectly happily wearing nothing at all and still somehow produce enough displaced clothing to make my bedroom chair look like it has joined a jumble sale.

There is a dressing gown on there too.

That one is important.

The dressing gown occupies a very specific position in a naturist household because it isn’t really clothing.

It’s emergency equipment.

Doorbell?

Dressing gown.

Unexpected visitor?

Dressing gown.

Need to put the bins out and the neighbours are outside?

Dressing gown.

Parcel arriving?

Dressing gown.

Although putting on a dressing gown after the delivery driver has already seen you through the glass in the front door does feel less like modesty and more like administrative procedure.

Anyway.

The chair.

I decided this morning that I was going to clear it.

It’s Monday. A new week. A fresh start.

You know the sort of optimism Monday morning gives you before Monday has had sufficient time to explain itself.

I picked up the jeans.

Easy.

Are they clean?

No.

Are they dirty?

Also no.

So where do they go?

I stood there holding them.

This is the entire reason the chair exists.

The laundry basket is a declaration.

Putting something in there means: you are finished. You will be washed.

The wardrobe is equally decisive.

It says: you are clean. Welcome home.

But the jeans?

The jeans are in limbo.

They have been worn for three hours. They are perfectly respectable. Washing them feels unnecessary. Putting them beside genuinely clean clothes feels somehow fraudulent.

So I put them back on the chair.

Excellent start.

Then I picked up the cardigan.

Sniff.

Don’t pretend you don’t do it.

Everybody does the sniff.

There is no domestic appliance on Earth capable of making a decision as quickly as the human nose presented with yesterday’s jumper.

Sniff.

Fine.

Chair.

I was now technically organising the chair by putting everything back onto the chair.

This is why I cannot be trusted with productivity.

Apparently professional organisers recognise exactly this sort of problem. Recent organising advice specifically identifies clothes that are neither clean nor dirty as a common source of floor and bedroom clutter, with one suggestion being to give those in-between clothes a designated basket rather than allowing them to migrate around the room.

A basket!

Of course!

So now, naturally, I want to buy a basket.

Please appreciate what has happened here.

I began with too much stuff on a chair and have concluded that the solution is to acquire another thing.

This is how houses grow.

Nobody buys clutter.

We buy solutions until eventually we need solutions for all the solutions.

And the experts are annoyingly right about something else: those little piles become almost invisible to us. Organisers describe the places where things get dropped and never quite put away as common clutter zones, precisely because we become accustomed to seeing them.

That’s my chair.

I stopped seeing it.

It became landscape.

Like Yr Wyddfa.

Like the Menai Strait.

Like a cardigan-covered bedroom chair that future archaeologists will excavate layer by layer to establish what I wore during September 2026.

“Here we see the Early Autumn Cardigan Period.”

Fascinating.

And perhaps that is why I noticed it this morning.

We’re at that peculiar point in September when clothes are becoming complicated again.

A few weeks ago, getting dressed required considerably less strategic planning. Now you leave the house and need to consider whether you’ll be warm, cold, wet, unexpectedly warm again, or all four before lunch.

Astronomically, summer hasn’t even quite finished: the autumn equinox in the UK is in the early hours of Wednesday, 23 September this year.

So perhaps the chair isn’t messy.

Perhaps it’s meteorological infrastructure.

I’m going with that.

By lunchtime I had successfully removed one top.

I put it in the wash.

Then I looked at the chair.

It looked exactly the same.

I swear clothes expand when nobody is watching.

Still, I’m not giving up.

Tonight I’m going to clear it properly.

Everything will either go into the wardrobe, the laundry basket or — because apparently this is who I am now — an official in-between basket.

And tomorrow morning I shall sit on my chair.

With coffee.

Possibly naked.

Looking proudly at the basket full of clothes beside me.

Which, now I think about it, means I’ll have simply moved the pile eighteen inches to the left.

Oh.

Please tell me I’m not alone: where do the clothes that are too clean for the wash but too worn for the wardrobe live in your house?