OLD TAT

This house is a terrible mess. There’s junk everywhere. We’ve got too little space and too much stuff. Believe me when I tell you that the attached picture only represents a fraction of the chaos I choose to live my life in. Most of it is old tat that I simply can’t bear to get rid of, of course, some of it dating back to when I was ridiculously young, and most of it isn’t worth anything at all to anybody except me.

Normally being surrounded by all this clobber really doesn’t bother me, but occasionally I get kind of obsessed with trying to find a certain something and suddenly the stuff all has to be moved and ploughed through and generally examined in a way it normally isn’t, in order to find the one little object that my mind has suddenly remembered, despite having been forgotten about for years, and simply must be found. That’s when I start to wonder about all the junk and whether I really should be thinking of getting rid of some of it.

This is usually because there will then follow a totally obsessive couple of hours or more as the object is tracked down (or sometimes not) by trawling through endless boxes, bags, piles of tat, shelves and cupboards. Sometimes, when I still can’t find the wretched thing I’m looking for, I will finally give up the hunt, but it can nag away at the corner of my mind for days afterwards, and I might at any time suddenly leap up with inspiration when I think of another nook or cranny I might just not have explored yet, and return to the sofa disappointed half an hour later having failed to find it once again.

Sometimes I’ll eventually forget about it and start looking for something else because that’s suddenly popped into my head and jumped ahead of the previous search in the priority stakes. That’s often when I find the first thing of course. Occasionally, to stop myself from brooding about the missing object, I’ll write myself a note with the word “find” on it and it will slowly sink from the forefront of my thoughts. Then, of course, a few days or weeks or months later, I might well find that little note I’ve written to stop the incessant hunting and the whole quiet revolution will happen again

Unless I’ve found it by accident in the meantime, which is, more often than not, what usually happens. If only I could develop a more holistic approach to these things, or just relax and say to myself that it will turn up eventually.

I sit here in my workspace surrounded by clutter and I think that it really can’t be healthy. My feng shui must be completely stuffed, which probably explains my mental clutter. I don’t know whether it dates back to having once been an art student, but I’ve always found it difficult to part with anything in case it one day comes in “useful”. I still have a ridiculous amount of the very poor artwork I produced as a student. Somewhere. I’ll have to dig it out… Now, where did I put it? Hold on a sec…

(Several hours elapse.)

I look around me and I realise I live in a total mess, and it’s really not as if any of this stuff has any actual value, except to remind me of things or to give me comfort in the knowledge that I know it still exists or it’s still there. Some of it belonged to my father or my grandparents and, I suppose, is just a way of hanging on to a piece of them. There used to be a TV show where a woman I used to unkindly refer to as the “House Nazi” used to declutter people’s lives, and I found it kind of unbearable viewing, but she would have had a lot to say about this need to hang on to the past I imagine, and would probably have made me blub on camera. However, I do think that maybe it’s time to start going through it all and really think about getting rid of some of it. Perhaps this process is something I will share with you. Maybe as I find some (un)interesting old piece of tat I will take its picture and tell you all about it. I know there are some old medals somewhere that might have a story to tell, and I’m pretty sure I saw some Kermit the Frog soap the other day when I was looking for that photo album I never found…

One of the things I’ve hung on to from my youth is the “Soccer Quiz Book” you see here and which I mentioned in passing a couple of days ago. Printed in 1971, it’s a cheap old thing but says a lot about how things have changed in children’s book publishing in those 40 years. Page one, question one (under the heading “Some easy ones to start you off”) is “Who scored the penalty that kept Arsenal in the F.A. Cup at the semi-final stage in 1971?” The answer is scrawled in my 8-year old self’s handwriting, so the book isn’t as unsullied as I thought, but that’s pretty much the only page that I  have touched, so I imagine that was on the day grandad bought it for me and my enthusiasm for my exciting new gift was still at its highest. Nonetheless, any children’s book that has words like "Panathinaikos" and "Gzira" in the so-called “easy” stuff seems to assume a level of knowledge from a seven year old that I guess we’d only expect from “Mastermind” finalists nowadays. I’m sure everyone else knows the answer to the question above, by the way, and it’s just me in my “shameful” football ignorance who hadn’t a clue, but of course the answers are printed just over the page in full size type and not back-to-front or anything. Perhaps we kids were easier to fool back then… or just more honest…?

Meanwhile, one of the pieces of old tat I do lament the passing of is the old “Public Information Films”. A lot of people found them rather silly, and said that they were just about common sense. Nowadays I’m starting to wonder if it was those little 30-second movies that were the things that instilled a lot of the common sense in the first place. On these dark mornings, when vehicle windows are steamed or iced up and the light is still very poor, an awful lot of people out and about in their dark clothes are practically invisible, and it amazes me still how many cycles don’t have lights on them these days. In the words of the old  PIF, “Get Yourself Noticed - Wear Something White” ("or carry a newspaper…" as it went on to say) because you know the councils are going to start turning off the lights to save money.

Keep yourselves safe, people.