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!

Confusion of things

 

 

From where I sit, my right hand can stretch forth and get an iPad, a Kindle, stationery, a Spanish dictionary, a rubber band ball, reading glasses, a Snow White tin of pens, pencils and markers, earphones, wipes for glasses, a magnifying glass, a Bluetooth loudspeaker, pills, a Catalan dictionary and so on.  My left hand can reach out and encompass more pens, pencils and markers, a ‘spare’ mobile phone, an internet radio, usb hub, a three-drawer trolley which is filled with even more impedimenta.

So why, I ask myself, when I needed to write down book details from an article that I was reading on the Internet, did I scribble them down with a stub of a pencil on the back of an envelope?  Within the scope of both right and left hands there is a stick-it note pad and more writing implements than I can ever need during the course of a normal day.  So why, when something is needed did I make do with the makeshift?

I have to admit that I am only slowly becoming a user of the mobile phone.  I don’t mean that in any ordinary sense, I have had a mobile phone for a long time and have changed my phones with a regularity that had brought delight into planned obsolescence hard-hearted capitalists through the years.  I also have to admit that I have rarely used the mobile phone as, well, a mobile phone. 

In the early years when the functions of the phone were really limited to making and receiving calls, I think that my possession of such a machine was more of a status symbol than anything else.  And, of course, because it was a gadget and therefore it was something that I had to possess.

Now that mobile phones do so much more than merely allow people to connect via voices, I find that I use the ‘phone’ function even less than I used to.  I read The Guardian on my phone, I read books, I use the Internet,

I play games (I am ashamed to admit that I am something of an addict of Candy Crush – it encourages that partial mindlessness that is so relaxing) and I take photos. 

The first time someone actually phoned me on my present phone (a Huawei P20 Pro) I couldn’t work out how to answer it and had to phone the person back after I managed to cut her off with all my frantic finger prodding of the screen.  My purchase of the P20 Pro (and I had to look up the name of the damn thing on the Internet to get it right, and that indicates where my prejudices lie!) was largely influenced by the fact that there were lots of lenses on the back of the case and that the camera had been developed in association with Leica – and, let’s face it, that is about as far as I am likely to get to owing a real one.  So, I bought it because it was a camera that I could read, so to speak.

But I still have the remnants of what one might call the ‘Box Brownie’ mentality where each photograph taken was using up part of the film that one had threaded (with care and difficulty) onto the spindles.  Each photograph had to be developed, each photograph was precious and expensive, its quality being linked to the fact that a photograph was part of a slow laborious process, there was nothing instant about it: buying the film, using the film, developing the film all combined to give an almost ritualistic feel to the whole rigmarole of taking a photograph.

Now digital photos are truly instant – though the physicality of what used to be the photograph has now all but disappeared: the camera is the photograph.  When was the last time that I actually printed out a photograph that I had taken?  The fact that I have to think about it (and I am still thinking about it) shows how long ago that was and what an occasion it must have been!

But I still behave as if each photograph was on film, as if each skeuomorphic[1] click (or whatever recorded sound you have playing on your phone) was the introduction of an element of cost in the production of a concrete piece of visual information.  But, nowadays, the camera is used as an aide memoire, as something to be used casually and then discarded as a visual reminder.

Which brings us back to the back of the envelope.  It didn’t occur to me to take a shot of the screen, or even a screen shot (as if I knew how to do that!) and save it for future use.  For something like book information, I needed to be the ideal of the scholar that I will never be, and scribble something down, to make it real, so that at a later date I could riffle through all my notes and marginalia and references and play at learning!

But, there is a function in all this writing: I find that things are more real when I read about them – even if I am reading what I have just written!  So, this might be taken to be a note to myself to make my life easier and remember that a digital photo, is just a free(ish) image that is just as useful, if not more so, that a fugitive scrap of paper that is in constant danger of being tidied up and lost.

As if I haven’t lost things on the computer, or on the phone.  But that is for another blog!

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[1]

It is thanks to the Open University and a unit on Greek vases that I came across the word Skeuomorphic and I wholeheartedly recommend this essay because it says something about ancient tastes and a twisted modern interpretation of what they might have been at the same time.  It is a good read: https://www.academia.edu/8587519/Skeuomorphism_in_ancient_Greece_a_cost_analysis