“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!
