Are you sitting comfortably?

 

 

 

Even though we are at the fag-end of the year, something happened today that will be the defining feature for me, and possibly for a few others too.

     My ‘creative space’ is not my brain, it is a ‘squalid corner’ of the third floor where my desk (cluttered) is hemmed in on one side by a sawn-off storage unit, a plastic segmented bookcase and a queeny printer; on the other by a series of CD box vaults, the back of an IKEA bookcase and an Anglepoise (knock-off not real) lamp; behind three low-rise bookshelves, a bewilderingly large number of plastic mini-shelved units and a lopsided arrangement of Things Too Large to Put Away Properly; in front is a low wall and the stair well.  And this altogether conducive-to-creation ensemble is finished by a high-backed office chair that is literally falling to bits, with the faux leather coming away in specks.

     Enough, I said to myself, I said, is enough!  A new chair is necessary and, furthermore, it will be something that can sweep up my Christmas and Name Day offerings into one coherent present.  The ‘Name Day’ thing is important in this part of the world and you ignore the recognition-through-presents at your own risk, it therefore follows (as the night the day) that reciprocation can work together for good.  As my Name Day is actually Boxing Day a seasonal personal present objective makes sense, so I thought a new chair would concentrate minds and contributions.

     Having tried a selection of chairs in all the main superstore outlets in the vicinity and found all of them lacking, Toni actually discovered a dedicated office furniture outlet with ‘sale’ prices in Cornella, a place a few towns along one of our motorways and a place passed through by me on my daily journey to the School on the Hill.

     Today was the day we visited the place.  I had (in mind and written in my notebook) a list of desirable attributes of the New Chair.  It had to have  i) a base of five wheeled feet  ii) a high back  iii) gas suspension  iv) be ergonomic  v) be made of leather  vi) have no arms or have removable arms  vii) look ‘the business’.  I did have a vague sort of idea of what sort of cost it might be, but I decided to be adventurous.

     The end result of much sitting and trying this and then trying that, was that the ergonomic trumped the leather.  The seat that I have decided on, and indeed ordered for delivery in January looks a bit more medical than office-like, but it is comfortable and virtually everything that can, adjusts.

     And the cost.

     Toni was and still is shell-shockedly stunned that any sentient life-form could even contemplate paying so much for what is, after all, at the end of the day, an office chair.  Well, I have.  Or at least I have paid a deposit.  And even the 20% deposit was large.  So, you can imagine that the whole thing (the other 80%) is, well, monstrous.

     In my defence, I would opine that my complete lack of smoking is a major factor in allowing sums of money which would have gone up in smoke and been ingested in tar to be used for something that is much more (much more) useful and necessary.  But is an awfully large sum of money.  For a chair.

     And, as its main material is a sort of mesh (to allow for air flow and healthiness) you don’t even get plush, buttoned leather for your money – in spite of the fact that the money you have paid could easily have allowed wheels to have been fitted to a handmade ottoman and still have had money left over.

     And I don’t care.  I have got (or at least will have) what I wanted.  And it is something that will be used.  And used constantly.  And, and I think I am trying to persuade myself here rather than any reader.  And so, I will stop.  But I (and that is the important pronoun) I, think that it is money well spent.  And I sincerely trust that I will be saying that in twenty years’ time (when I am still using the bloody thing) and then dividing the price I paid in 2020 by the number of years I have been using it and saying to myself, “It’s a bargain!” and “My back has never felt better!” and so on.

     I am further encouraged by the fact that the person selling me thing was actually using one of them as her own office chair.  And that has to be good.  Doesn’t it?  Yes?

     What the AOTC (Advent of the Chair) will necessitate is Doing Something to the chaos of the third floor.  Such a splendid beast must have space in which to dominate the surroundings.  The detritus behind me at the moment must go.  Where?  I know not, but somewhere not behind me.  The Chair will be brought unto me by the lackeys of the firm and they will Construct The Chair, presumably by bringing up the pieces to the third floor.  There is no room whatsoever to do any construction so, what years of nagging by Toni have failed to do, the AOTC will force me to do: create space where no space exists.

     My last and latest attempt to Clear Up the third floor comprised checking through long unopened files and junking and shredding irrelevant papers.  This created gratifying large bags of rubbish, but not any appreciable space as I had been excavating rather than bulldozing.  Something much more radical is called for, and to be frank, I am not sure that I can muster up enough iconoclastic zeal to do the necessary.  Toni has, bless him, offered to do the ‘tidying up’ for me, but I know that I would have to ‘dispose’ of him after the event when I realized what priceless pieces of ephemera he might have got rid of!

     So, the next few weeks are going to demand a positively Dominican level of material rejection from me if I am to make any impression on the cluttered chaos.  Wish me luck or wish me the equanimity to see the AOTC as setting a diamond in the dross of attic confusion!

     And yes, I am well aware that I have not actually told you the price of the thing.  And yes, I have no intention whatsoever of so doing.  I may be happy (if that is the word that I am looking for) with what I have done, but I think that I can only convince others by denying them specific totals.  Better to speculate with lurid imagination rather than condemn in black and white!  And you will have noticed that I chose a generic chair for illustration rather than something more identifiable.

 

 

 

 

And talking of the unjustifiable, Johnson is trying to have his cake and eat it: he fulfils his promise to allow us to celebrate Christmas but wants us not to do it because it will fuel the increase in Covid infection.  So, what this appalling man is actually doing is putting the onus on the British People.  He lacks the courage to admit that he was wrong to promise a variant on the “it will be all over by Christmas” (that always works out well!) and instead of imposing legally enforceable restrictions he is leaving it all up to us.  He will then, of course, wash his hands and say that it was made clear by the government that there were risks involved and people were warned, but people will be people and therefore you have only yourselves to blame!  He truly is repellent.

     Here in Catalonia and in Spain things do not appear to be much better.  Our prime minister has had to self-isolate because of his proximity to the French president and we all know that all hell is going to break out after the Christmas period.

     We have gone through a year when normal has been taken out roughed up, lightly killed, spat at, insulted, trampled on and general bad mouthed.  I think we know that we are in the final stretch, and I further think that we know that the final stretch is not going to be measured in weeks but rather in months.  And probably quite a few months.  I am telling myself that I will be lucky, very lucky, if I am vaccinated by April.  And since I tick a few of the ‘at risk’ boxes, I think it is going to be the end of the summer or the middle of the autumn until a majority of the country is close to having had the jab.

     Given those expectations, Christmas is neither here nor there, it is just an odd date in the unrelenting sequences that we have been subject to during this pandemic.

 

But my chair will be here in January.  Something concrete to look forward to.

Too much, is too much

 

It comes to something that I regard as a positive achievement the fact that I can squeeze myself sideways through a narrow path of piled high possessions to get to my desk on the third floor in an almost direct passageway from the top of the stairs!  The room still looks as though it has been ransacked by indiscriminate looters, but believe me, that is an improvement on what it looked like before the attempt to turn the electricity grid in the house into a way of getting better reception for my internet radio.

     If you are still reading after ploughing your way through the last two unnecessarily complex sentences, I salute your fortitude and your innate optimism in assuming there must be a linguistic or literary reward for perusing such verbiage!

     I have never, it must be said, been able to keep a clear desk.  Whether at home or at school or work (which was also school) my desk (no matter how big it was) would, in a matter of days be reduced to a workspace more suited to a submarine than a spacious house.

     Take this moment for example.  I sit in front of a computer, in front of which is an Apple ‘magic’ keyboard and a presumably equally enchanted touch pad.  The amount of free space on my expansive desk is (I have just measured it) is a thin strip of desk on the left-hand side of the keyboard of some 12 cms!

     Just to give you some idea of what I do with ease and a certain aplomb I will describe what I can see from where I sit – and I am going to give you only the briefest outline of what ‘things’ there are occupying the space that should be free for papers and books.

     On my right is a book of post-its (with another collection of post-its further in the debris) with a rogue CD, notebooks, a copy of The Economist from April 2013; a cable for linking to the Internet; a book stand; a DVD of ‘Weekend’ – a film by Andrew Haigh with Tom Cullen who I used to teach; a disc drive; ‘The Arts of Spain’ by José Gudiol, published by Thames and Hudson; a reMarkable electronic tablet; a metal book end and a packet of blutac.  All of that lot (and more) blends into the printer and a bookcase arching over it.

     The sheer amount of stuff on the left-hand side is overwhelming and to list it in any detail will call into question not only my sanity but also my sanity.  Suffice to say a (highly edited) list of what is there includes a low cardboard box decorated with multiple images of Warhol’s Marilyn that I have designated as an ‘Archive’; a box of Christmas cards; an Internet radio; three pairs of scissors (me neither); pens, pencils, rulers; an electric pencil sharpener; a large bottle of black printer ink and a collection of plastic straws 70cms long.  There is a reason that I bought those straws, and it has nothing to do with Blue Peter constructions or drinking!

     So, I am confined to a tiny space in front of the computer.  If I do any writing that needs recourse to reference books, I have no space whatsoever to lay them out around me. 

     And because the third floor is so cluttered, there is no space to move things while you decide where to put them.  If you see what I mean.

 

     

 

     Toni accuses me of suffering from Diogenes’ Syndrome, where the unfortunate cannot throw things away.  I am not convinced by this as I seem to recall that Diogenes was the philosopher who was keen to divest himself of all physical possessions and who lived in utter simplicity (and nakedness) in a barrel.  Is the name of the syndrome based on irony?  Anyway, although, it is true that I do have a disinclination to throw things away (You never know when they might come in useful!) all the things I keep have a basic utility.  I find it hard to throw away containers, even though containers allow me to squirrel things away that otherwise might have been dispensed with.

     I remember, from years ago, a medical drama series, in which one episode concerned a medical technician who created very specific pieces of equipment for very specific patients – and then he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of those pieces of equipment, in spite of the fact that the individuality was so pronounced that their general utility was zero.  I think the more astute among you will have worked out where the narrative thrust is going.  Sure enough, a patient appears whose treatment demands just such a piece of equipment that he has in his stores and which people have been urging him to junk because it is taking up valuable, expensive room.  Diogenes justified.  But that is not why I remember the episode.

     After his triumph of being able to magic up something extraordinary for a particular patient ‘from stock,’ another scene showed him in his stockroom kicking something that he tried to move and dislodged a whole welter of other bits and pieces and saying, almost in tears of frustration, something like, “I hate all this bloody junk!”

     I am sure that the episode was not quite like that, but I remember it because it gave both sides: one piece did save a life, but most of what he had was junk and took up space.  I liked the complexity of his being proved right, but still probably being wrong in his indiscriminate belief that everything and anything might be useful.

     The Health Service can take whatever money is given to it, there will always be something that needs funding.  But funding is finite.  At some point decisions have to be made; judgements that have life changing consequences.  Just like the space for the technician’s ‘junk’.

     These decisions and judgements are not theoretical, they are being made all the time.  In the Days of Covid those decisions are here and now, we can see (and bury) the results of political decisions about what to do with limited resources.

 

 

 

 

 

     As we are Waiting for Vaccine, we have to hope that those vials are not the Godot of our times, and that the right decisions and judgements are being made on our behalf!

'Tidy!' - the visual accusation!

“No reason at all!” is the best reason in the world to take up the keys and start typing out a continuation of this blog.  It has been far too long since I have availed myself of the therapeutic exercise of indulging my proclivity to prolixity!

The real reason for my writing today is because of tidying.

I am not, it has to be admitted, a congenitally tidy person.  I know (as every messy liver will aver) where things are in ‘a general sort of way’ even if I find it difficult to be anything more than vague about absolute location.

But there comes a point in any Clutter-Man’s life when simple entrance and egress is made difficult by the sheer weight and substantiality of stuff.  To put it simply, I was finding the way to my desk on the third floor more and more of an obstacle course.  And painful too.  The third floor interior area is the equivalent of the attic and, while it is open to the stairs (and has its own terrace) it does have a sharply sloping roof/ceiling on one side and, if you are trying to navigate your way through a selection of boxes, furniture and other sundry impedimenta one is apt to forget headroom and until the head in question makes its presence felt by a sharp blow by the ceiling.

In self-defence, therefore, tidying had to be done.  But it is very difficult to tidy when there is no spare space for those things that need tidying to be tidied into.   

The whole process then becomes like a three dimensional slide-a-slate puzzle where you have to push the bits next to the space in an increasingly frustrating sequence before you get what you want where you want it.

So I emptied things out on to the terrace.  This gives the illusion of space, or its reality if you have the strength of will to ignore the rubble just the other side of the glass doors.  There is also the nagging horror of what to do with the stuff that you have merely displaced rather than dealt with.

My solution, as is so often the case, was to go shopping.

Lidl have, this week, a special offer of rather fetching plastic storage boxes.  I also possess a library book trolley that is far too large for the ‘library’ that it was bought for.  So, in a masterly utilization of uselessness I have bedecked the trolley with the new boxes and have attempted to winnow the floor based confusion of papers and cables and things into opaque boxed order.  Since the trolley has wheels, I am also able to move the loaded machine to gain access to bookcases that have long been denied me.  And it has only taken me all week.

And that time has not only been spent on the third floor, but also in the library itself where one part is actually my wardrobe.  Because of the difficult of access (cf. large trolley above) clean clothes tended to amass rather than be put away.  So, before I could get to the trolley I had to tidy away all the flotsam clothes that formed a barrier to exploration of the inner recesses of the bibliophile sanctum wherein the trolley resided.

So, given the amount of stuff that had to be ‘tidied’ (I have put the term in inverted commas because I know that my version of that word gets nowhere near Toni’s definition where he tidies in detail and in depth; my approach is superficial to say the least) I feel proud that it has only taken the best part of a working week to get from chaos to mere unruly clutter.

All of which allows, nay, encourages me to type and write. 

Cui bono?  I leave for you to judge!