"Clutter has only two possible causes: too much effort is required to put things away or it is unlcear where things belong." - Marie Kondo
I spent the day tackling a small part of the paper mountain.
If you want a terrifying glimpse into how my brain works, read on.
As mentioned in January, one of the reasons I wanted to resume this blog is that I hoard information, and consequently my life is cluttered with an ever-increasing number of notebooks, diaries, cuttings, leaflets, magazine articles worth keeping, snippets scrawled in exercise books and onto odd bits of paper, images I saw and liked, and instructions for important things like this:
My flat, in other words, is a repository for endless ephemera. And instead of being organised about it, it is utter chaos.
Adopting the Kondo advice, I now have a notebook specifically for recording quotes, a couple more to stick images in, another to jot down books I'd like to read, and so on. But there is still way too much disorganisation, because the stuff comes in faster than I can keep up with it (yes the internet has been the bane of my life, thanks for asking).
If I post things on here, I thought in January, I can throw at least some this crap away feeling like I acted upon it in some small, perhaps even useful for future purposes, kind of way.
Fine, if I ever manage to get round to catching up with a backlog spanning many years.
Today I went through a box of stuff I'd swept off the desk a while back in order to tidy the desk (so much of my 'tidying' involves moving things from one place to another, instead of acting on, organising, or getting rid of it). The box contained eleventy million random jottings I'd made about interesting topics and general curiosities - quotes and excerpts, books to read, doodles and diagrams, snippets of creative writing, things to watch, music to listen to, places to go, things to see and things to Google. Most of it came from an A4 pad that got filled up in 2016.
The first thing to do was put the laptop on Flight Mode. After that I typed everything I came across that needed a follow-up search into a new tab, and left it there to come back to later, rather than interrupt the flow of methodical organisation/destruction with tantalising distractions.
At close of play, most of the info had been scanned or transferred to a dedicated notebook. I'd opened 22 tabs. Here are those searches, plus results:
2. Menotox
3. Slowfood.com
6. 01 811 8055
7. [Redacted] - the name of a girl I went to school with. No results, but a subsequent peek at the old girls' association FB page found her on the Head Girls board:
It also came up with a photo (from 2011) of faces still instantly recognisable despite not having seen them for almost 40 years:
(By a curious coincidence, I started following one of these people on Twitter via a mutual follower without realising who it was. I haven't owned up. For the same reason I haven't - and wouldn't - go to any school reunions. Autism FTW.)
8. Looking For Trouble by Charles Simic
9. Ruth Behar Ethnography and the Book that was Lost Ethnography 4 no.1 2003 p37
10. Nil By Mouth Gary Oldman film
11. www.toshworld.com got a security notice:
But luckily there's still a Toshworld blog full of pictures of fantastically kitsch souvenir tat.
12. Marmota
13. Oliver Sacks 'My Periodic Table' essay 2015
14. Loving What Is by Byron Katie
15. The Soap Co Keswick. Concerning that they haven't tweeted since 2019 and the link to their website is broken. Hope they're still in business - they're wonderful.
16. free katharine hibbert book - turns out this is a booked called Free by Katharine Hibbert and not a free book by Katharine Hibbert. Never mind; it still looks well worth a read.
17. Upbeat Sneakers - saw them supporting The Beat at Clwb Ifor Bach a while back and even though the entire band looked about 12 years old they were great:
18. Action on Post-Partum Psychosis
19. Field For The British Isles Anthony Gormley
20. 21 Pembridge Crescent. My mum is listed as living here in the 1952 electoral roll. She'd been working in Cambridge in 1950, and in 1953 or 1954 she met my dad in Leeds. She was a manager in the HMSO, and got sent to places to open new offices. When she got married, she had to resign, because the civil service didn't allow married women to carry on working.
It's a lifelong regret that I never knew this sparky, efficient, managerial person, only her subjugated, defeated shell. Marriage to my dad and three kids didn't really work out for her, but she kept at it gamely til the bitter end because that's what you did in those days:
21. gogreenbatteries.co.uk - a successful eBay order for camera batteries back in the day; would use them again.
22. Kerrenhappuch Chick:
According to a family tree, Kerrenhappuch Chick was the great-great-grandmother of my paternal grandfather's grandmother. With a name like that I thought something might've come up, but no.
(Leaving out the inverted commas just found a load of dubious sites featuring the word 'chick').
Somewhere along that familial line, a Long married a Trump. Finding out there was a Trump in my heritage was a shock, but the record shows it is not the same batch of Trumps, so it's fine.
I might adopt Kerrenhappuch Chick as a nom de plume; it's fabulous.
From a vast stack of paper I'm left with two films to watch, some articles to read, and a whole load of crap in the bin. Even though I realise that in the grand scheme it was a total waste of time, I'm still calling this a productive day.
Today's Photo: Rain
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