Tag Archives: restraint

Sep 23 2025
socio-cultural

Life’s Too Short to Scrape the Lurpak. But Maybe That’s the Point

A nearly empty white Lurpak butter tub with a stainless steel knife inside sits on a light wooden kitchen countertop. Beside it is a small ceramic plate scattered with toast crumbs. Soft daylight falls from the left, casting gentle shadows across the minimalist, muted interior with wooden furniture and a blurred potted plant in the background.
Life’s too short to be buttering existential crises out of a plastic tub.

This morning I found myself scraping the bottom of a Lurpak tub.

A white, gently bowing receptacle with just enough residual butter to tease the knife, but not enough to make it worth the effort. And yet, there I was: wrist contorted, scraping sideways, skimming over craters of cold margarine laminate, determined to liberate one last smear.

For toast.

I paused, mid-scrape, and felt the creeping absurdity of it all. Why do we do this? This frugal choreography. This dignified desperation. Is it habit? Shame? Some Protestant hangover of moral rectitude that equates waste with weakness?

Or is it worse than that, is it training?

A kind of domesticated eco-asceticism, learned not out of genuine conviction but out of decades of thinly veiled moral instruction. Don’t waste. Save scraps. Rinse your yoghurt pots. Aspire to net zero in all things, including pleasure. Butter, it turns out, is not neutral.

I don’t want to be the kind of man who scrapes the last dregs of butter from the corners of a tub. It feels small. Slightly emasculating. A man reduced to margarine management. And yet, aren’t these the very values we claim to admire? Moderation. Responsibility. The quiet dignity of thrift.

There’s a strange modern tension here: the aesthetic of abundance, paired with the rituals of restraint. Middle-class frugality presented as virtue. A lifestyle of minimalism, yes, but premium minimalism. We don’t waste Lurpak because it costs £4.50 a tub. Because we bought the “Spreadable” version as a treat and now feel complicit in dairy decadence.

But scratch deeper and it’s not really about the butter at all.

It’s about effort. It’s about where we place it. We pour our energies into small, containable acts of domestic diligence because the larger systems feel untouchable. We cannot fix politics, housing, the climate, or the cultural entropy of our time, but by God, can we finish a tub of butter.

And maybe that’s OK. Maybe part of surviving modern life is choosing the scale at which we can still act meaningfully, however trivial it seems. Scraping the butter is absurd. But so is most of life, and at least this kind of absurdity ends with warm toast.

Still, I didn’t finish it. I threw the tub away, started a new one, and felt a small thrill of liberation.

No one applauds the man who knows when to stop scraping. But they should.

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Sep 18 2025
work

So the Hallway Shuts Up About It

A quiet, lived-in Edwardian kitchen with soft natural light streaming through large sash windows. A brushed chrome tap stands over a deep white Belfast sink, set into pale wooden cabinets with faded cream tiling above. A worn oak table with mismatched wooden chairs sits in the centre of the room. To the right, a slightly scuffed stainless steel Maytag fridge and an old gas cooker are tucked into the corner. The space feels unstyled, with muted grey and off-white tones, and subtle signs of use but no clutter. The mood is still and contemplative, as if someone has just stepped out.
When you renovate every other room and the kitchen starts looking at you like it knows it’s next.

We’ve been doing up the house. Nothing dramatic, just the slow, financially ruinous crawl from upstairs to down. Bedrooms first. Then bathrooms. Then the living room. And now the kitchen (inherited from the previous owners) is sulking. Every time I walk into it, I swear the tiling looks a shade more shabby-shite 2006.

It’s not that much is broken. Except the tired Maytag fridge freezer, a burner that doesn’t ignite and the sink tap leaks, oh and the ruinously-expensive-to-repair-out-of-warranty Miele dishwasher. It’s just been… outclassed. Like turning up to a wedding in M&S when your wife’s in The Row.

And this irritates me, because I’d quite like to think I live with a bit of restraint. I’ve written before about resisting the upgrade spiral. About not living like a man permanently preparing for an estate agent’s photoshoot. But it turns out that once you start, the rest of the house doesn’t politely wait its turn, it stages a coup.

The formal name for this, according to Rory Sutherland, is the Diderot Effect. You buy one nice thing and everything else starts to look shit by comparison. Diderot got a red dressing gown and ended up replacing half his house. We bought a fancy shower mixer and now the kitchen tap feels like it came out of a skip.

Which is how we end up here. Discussing a kitchen renovation because although it’s neither urgent, nor falling apart, it’s because the surrounding rooms have raised the bar to a level our sad little units can’t clear. And I hate myself for it. Because I also know that if we do go ahead, the new kitchen will make the hallway feel dingy, and the garden and patio will look lazy and provincial, and so on until we die or go bankrupt.

And yet, this is the maddening bit, I also know we’ll probably do it. It’s not vanity. We don’t want quartz or fluted wood or some comically oversized kitchen island, we just want to stop thinking about it. To be able to walk through the space without mentally adding it to a list.

It’s the tyranny of the unfinished, the psychological admin of rooms and spaces you haven’t yet dealt with.

There is, of course, a way to dodge all this. You could adopt the Sutherland doctrine and buy a 16th century house. One of those glorious old piles that look better because they’re full of crap. But we don’t live in a Tudor house. We live in an Edwardian semi in Surrey where any attempt at minimalism makes the place look like a probate sale, and maximalism makes it look like you’re an edgy creative that’s gone mad on Etsy.

So here we are. Planning a kitchen. Not for resale. Not for guests. Not even for ourselves, really. Just so the hallway shuts up about it.

AI: This piece was, as ever, written by me. I used ChatGPT to sub-edit, and keep the tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives, and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpts and image that accompanies it.

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