The Great Clear Out! Or not.

 

 

The Tidying thing.  It’s now become one of those irritating elephants in the room that simply won’t go away, and it has started trumpeting as well!

     The basic trouble is that there are ALWAYS better things to do than tidying.  As long as the chaos is relatively clean and there is no rodent community inhabiting the mess then the motivation to start ordering the disordered is limited.

    I once compared the actual working space on my commodious desk to the size of a dinner plate.  Sometimes that image is inaccurate and the comparison is more with a side plate than anything else.  At one point I was making a note and needed to consult something in the dictionary (vowels always trip me up and getting them the wrong way round always looks so childish) and I found myself pushing my chair away from the desk to allow me to balance the dictionary (it is large!) by cantilevering it over the edge of said desk. 

     It is clearly absurd that I appear to be working towards emulating some sort of nineteenth-century mezzotint caricature of a scholar working in a cramped attic.  It is true that on the third floor, the room in which I work has been carved out of the roof, so there is indeed a sloped ceiling over my head, and I have to be very careful about how I stand up otherwise I could slump back unconscious into my chair having knocked myself out by too precipitate an ascent!

     The untidiness by which I am surrounded is almost comic in its chaos – though I sometimes do detect a sort of narrative thread linking the different piles of detritus (which isn’t, it is all essential ‘stuff’) and the ancillary scraps of my life scattered about as a type of surface layer, or erratics (if I may be allowed to use a metaphor from geology) to give an air of mystery and suggest hidden depths and an underlying order to what is quite clearly The Mayhem of Objects.

     There are two reasons for writing this.  The first, and the most obvious is that writing about something like tidying is a way of ensuring that it does not get done, because you have already ‘done’ something by the mere act of writing about it.  And the subject of the writing would disappear if careless ordering were to destroy its unstructured, yet intentional randomness.  Even I think that the previous sentence is mere verbiage, no matter how seriously I might take it as a form of self-defence for indolence!

     The second reason for writing this is that the writing may act as a stimulus to do something about a situation that irritates me every time I have to thread my way through the maze of incommodiousness before I can get to my scrap of working space at my desk.

     I know that I often write notes to myself, usually during my post-gym/pool cup of tea, and I even draw in little tick boxes as a further incentive to get things done.  I am proud to relate that I am made of sterner stuff than can be cajoled into acquiescence by four small lines, and the empty space thus enclosed often goes unticked.  But . . .

     There does come a time when the joke has gone far enough, when the situation is untenable when Something Has To Be Done.

     This situation has, I think, been reached.  I find myself juggling a notebook, a sheet of paper, and a couple of books (a conglomeration that should be easily accommodated on a reasonably sized desk) with increasing desperation.  And once I (almost) said to myself, “I simply cannot work like this!”

      I may not have voiced it, but I have certainly meant it.  Though meaning something without doing it negates the whole imperative.

     I will have to look on this writing as both an appeal for help, and also a decision to act.  If the situation is untenable then it must not be allowed to continue.  Action must follow.

 

Look on this as Part I of the Great Clean Up & Out.  It will be interesting to see if there will be further instalments.  I can assure you, my reader, that I am as interested in the outcome as you are indifferent!

     Time will tell.

 

More Power Please!

    

 

 

When my parents bought their first semi-detached house together it was built on a green-field site in Rumney.  When we as a family went to visit, it was basically a field with Michaelmas daisies, a few poppies and lots of grass.  Eventually a rough road was cut into the site, and the outline of the proposed streets began to take shape.

     Foundations were laid and building work began.  But not on our plot!

     We were given various reasons for this delay, the most convincing one being that our plot was a sort of roundabout and roadway for the trucks and lorries serving the site and therefore could not be built on until much of the basic work on the site had been done.

     I had moved schools from Cathays to Llanrumney to accommodate our move into the new house.  Which wasn’t there and continued not to be there as I started Standard Three in Glan yr Avon Primary School.

     The great advantage of buying a new build is that you have some say (as far as the money stretches) to add extras, and so we were able to have double the allocation of power points in the kitchen and the living room.  And, as I recall a fancy tiled fireplace.  We could not stretch to a garage.  I love the way I say “we” as if my seven-year-old self could have contributed anything in the way of actual money to the enterprise!

     By the time that we were fully established in the new house it was the early 1960s and it was rapidly becoming clear that even with double the electrical outlets the power needs were outstripping the sockets available.  This was even more clearly the case in the kitchen where, in our previous home, the only regularly used electrical item (apart from the washing machine with mangle) was the toaster – whereas in the consumer driven 60s more and more electrical aids were deemed essential to the modern home.

     Nowadays so many of the devices, desires and gadgets of ordinary existence have batteries and need feeding on a daily basis that there are never enough outlets in which to plug to keep life going.

     I was going to continue by listing how many things I could see from where I am sitting that need power, but having seen two radios, three fans, a computer, a printer, three lights – I am disinclined to continue before people wonder what else is lurking in the morass of ‘stuff’ on my desk, and how the hell I manage to get anything done in said chaos (cf. earlier blogs!)

     This means, of course, in rooms that are studies, you will always find the ubiquitous trailing socket sprouting an unhealthy (and dangerous) accretion of plugs which, if all were utilized at the same time would probably short out most of the neighbourhood.

     I have to admit that I am guilty of trying to get around the dearth of sockets via the powered raft approach to electrical supply – but the offending articles are usually out of sight, under desks or behind furniture and therefore out of mind.

     Considering that I am surrounded by highly flammable paper in the form of books, magazines and my writing, I like to think that my word production is at least on a par with the danger inherent in moderate mountaineering.  I laugh to scorn electrical adversity!  Right up until the first spark.  And I don’t mean of imagination.

     The only thing that is running ‘hot’ on my desk is my Mac Mini which, with its base giving me more outlets looks as though it is powering a small city.  As a concession to safety I have taken out one of the power drains on it, where it was powering up a mini power bank!

     How many years do I have to regress before I can remember a time where I did not need extra electricity, where the power kept the light on and I needed nothing more? 

     I can still remember the birthday when I was about six, when I woke up to find my present had been placed in my bedroom when I was asleep, a wind-up record player with a very small collection of 78 rpm shellac records for me to play.  My parents were woken from their slumbers by the first of (many) playings of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (a tune and song they came to hate, as I never wearied of playing it) until the needle wore down and had to be replaced.

     I had no radio, or phone, or computer, or television, or ipad, or camera or anything that was electrical.  The most sophisticated thing that I owned was a Raleigh Star Rider bicycle that I was given for passing the 11+

     “The Good Old Days”?  I think not, it’s a meaningless question, there are far too many variables to consider for it to be useful.  But different certainly.  And something to think about.

At least the hoover works

Well deserved

The major advantage to studying is not a belief in the idea that ‘to live is to educate’, but rather the relief that you feel each time you complete an exercise or essay.  It is like a headache; you don’t realise how delightful normality is until pain shows you what non-normality can be like! 

However much you enjoy the learning process, there are few things to beat the sheer relaxation that comes when the proof that you have completed a unit of learning has been sent off to the powers that be and there is nothing further that you can do except wait.

            I am now in that honeymoon period of waiting for a response and I am going to make the most of it.  I am ahead of myself as far as the reading that we have to do is concerned, so I can give almost my full attention to my poetry.

Poetic justice?

In what I am sure could be seen as a fairly grotesque metaphor for something or other, our robot hoover ate its own power lead.  At least it tried.  There is, luckily, a fail-safe system that kicks into play when the machine tires to consume something more substantial than dust.  So, when Toni came back from his walk the poor machine was bleeping plaintively in the middle of the living room with the power lead firmly in its innards.

            Don’t worry, I rescued the poor thing, disengaged the lead and it is now feeding quietly and will roll into renewed operation when we go off for lunch.

            This time I will put the power leads well out of its way – and check the receptacle at the end of its time to check that it has actually been doing what it is supposed to do.

Beyond a joke

In the lead up to the Spanish election, the bunch of morally bankrupt thieves and liars that have hijacked the government have sunk to a new low.  The Minister of Justice (sic) has decreed that people will no longer be termed imputado when they are accused of a crime, they will be termed investigado instead.  Why?  I hear you ask!  Well, a large section of the ruling PP party are totally and completely corrupt, as are their friends and paymasters in banks and businesses.  So many of them have been imputado that they have had to find a way to make it sound a little less, uh, criminal in the run up to the election that they have resorted to the desperate expedient of changing the word: semantic hiding of criminality.

            The unspeakable horror who has come out of retirement to stand for PP as a possible candidate for Mayor of Madrid should be ashamed to be seen in public.  She is a hit and run driver and virtually all her past colleagues are either in prison or are awaiting prison.  She, however, remarkably, astonishingly, unbelievably, alone-ly amongst all her erstwhile criminal colleagues is pure and untainted.  As if!

            And she is not alone.  Every day there is a new scandal about the way PP are ruling (I use the word lightly) the country, or some new revelation about how the PP wealthy backers have been milking cash from banks and companies.  Few of them are in prison and I have little belief that Justice (whatever that word means in Spain at the moment) will prevail and that the droves of thieves and liars who daily parade themselves on our television screens will get their comeuppance.  But I live in hope and trust that Podemos will get a healthy showing in the election and force the established (and corrupt) political parties to pass laws which will bring some degree of transparency to political life.

Continuing lunch

Tomorrow sees Irene arriving to join us for lunch.  We will have to go somewhere different to boost Toni’s blog.  It’s hard work enjoying yourself.