Frail paper?

My past is in tatters and shreds.

Quite literally.

I am sure that there is supposed to be something cathartic about the cleansing which accompanies a sorting through of old papers, but it does take determination to start the process and see it through.

Assuming that the selling of the house is progressing satisfactorily (a dangerous assumption I know, but one that I want to make) it has become necessary to start one of the final processes: the sorting and destruction of Those Things Not Needed in Catalonia.

The ‘easiest’ part of this process is based on paper. Old documents, tax returns, letters and other codices – piled one on another like geological strata of my personal history. To use another geological term, there are also ‘erratics’ odd documents or photographs which are seemingly misplaced in their drift of documents and by their incongruity they create disconcerting juxtapositions.

I shredded programmes and information from my university days: memories of odd dramatic entertainments in which I played characters ranging from a surrealistic professor to an American father by way of a King. I can still remember the barely stifled mirth of my so-called friends as I assayed an American accent: some humiliation lives on long after the event! There were plaintive letters to the tax man asking for tax relief for a typewriter I bought. Refused. Books I bought. Partially accepted. Early attempts at well meaning work sheets reflecting hours of work and limited pupil effectiveness. Letters from organizations, bodies, associations, committees, firms, shops, friends, colleagues, unions and councils. All shredded.

Not all of those sheets of A4 were of equal importance, or of equal emotional force. It really is odd to look at something which refers to something important and deeply personal, yet it doesn’t make it to the storage container to go to Spain. There is something audacious and strangely liberating in destroying ‘unimportant’ aspects of a life; transient and fragile as a piece of paper, yet containing a key to memory as strong and immediate as a jolt of electricity.

And before anyone thinks that I have been cavalier with the past; I have destroyed nothing which is not contained in another, stronger document which is safe in the cardboard box of Catalan essentials!

As the days pass I will have to delve deeper and deeper into the intimidating mass of ‘stuff’ which still remains in Cardiff. Having just had yet another communication from the solicitors asking me all sorts of questions; one of which needed my response that I would leave the house cleared and tidy, there is a ‘moral imperative’ [Bob Geldof] that I start clearing now!

I have always found teaching advertisements interesting. Although many of them are militantly worthless and defiantly bland one or two of them have real intelligence or take presentation a step forward by producing something which is a little masterpiece of concentrated information. Two of the Barclay’s adverts which use the hapless youth with exploding machinery and interesting at each viewing, while the animation on the Citroen advert is extraordinary in its attention to detail in the presentation of the car as skater.

The advert which has occupied a few idle moments is neither of these, but the Gillette advert. Quite apart from the glorious inanity of the pseudo nuclear imagery of a sort of bicoloured particle accelerator to give added pizzazz to a very ordinary multi-blade razor, I do wonder at their choice of men as models.

Gillette seems to have a positive policy in using ostensibly handsome clean cut American men with zero sex appeal. I don’t really know how they do it; but time after time they people the screen with testosterone fuelled ciphers which seem to have no real existence outside the bright lights of the Gillette Universe. This is a good thing as, were the world to be populated with Gillette men, it would gradually lose its population as these chisel chinned, neutered pieces of superficiality would surely have ‘difficulty’ in producing progeny.

BT man seems to have a more convincing chanced to reproduce – and he would never make it to the gallery of gallants of Gillette. Thank god