Not me, I hope. On further consideration that may not have been the best title ever for a blog posting.
The occupation which is causing serious boredom is tidying up. Not just the putting it all in neat piles variety of tidying. I am attempting the ‘what is at the bottom of this box?’ discovered by empirical research, variety of tidying. Worse, everything which is excavated has to have a proper new home, preferably not this one.
Some git has, of late, or even, apparently, for a couple of years, just kept buying new boxes. This is the same git that designed an entire craft room with one wall all cupboards in the mistaken and simplistic belief that this would be tidy. There is nothing tidy about filling a cupboard with junk and then buying a big plastic box to put in front of the cupboard. Worse, it was a stacking box. Or four.
Then there were the giant trolleys on wheels. Two of them about the size of a hospital trolley for people but with three, count them, three shelves, which turned out to be self-filling with junk so that now, as the cupboards and stack boxes in the box stacks were full, the junk could be wheelable. Until, of course, the little castors gave up and their ankles broke.
There is no excuse for it anymore. There is currently no reason to need to make cards to send twice a week. I’ve just done the calendar for this year with a birthdays column down the side. Twenty-five birthdays. That’s all.
It’s not even stuff for doll making. I have enough stuff to make dolls for at least another twenty years.
I also must stop buying bits of fabric. I have at least ten potential quilts in little pieces of fabric in a cupboard. That has four boxes of overflow fabric. Big boxes.
To use up all the papers to make memory books I’ll have to record every sneeze and every hooray of every family member for the next six years, at least.
Thank goodness for the craft section of the lockdown library. I just hope crafty library users are as temporarily entranced by steampunk papers and moulds as I have been. If they want to take them home, put them in a box and think about them for a few years that’s fine by me; there’s precedent for that.
Paper is so self-generating round here it does make you wonder about Hansard and all the other recordings of above-board government business in democracies round the world. At least it isn’t in cuneiform on stone tablets. A year-end clear out of hundreds of stone tablets must have been a nightmare. I’m not surprised the Rosetta stone got broken, someone probably wanted five minutes off and a cup of tea. I know I do.
I cleared one giant trolley and then restacked it with paper and card. If I buy another packet of cards and matching envelopes, even at massive knockdown bargain prices, it’s proof positive of insanity.
The other giant trolley is clear. I need it to be clear for doll dressing, during which activity everything comes out of the chest of drawers and gets put on the trolley in easy reach.
Some people buy stuff to use, use it, throw away anything they haven’t used and then buy more when they need it. I do not know such people. They may be apocryphal.
Did you watch the plesiosaur programme? Digging a plesiosaur out of a cliff face where it has been neatly hidden for millions of years in order to have to make glass cases for all the bits, and, possibly, an entire new building for all the new glass cases, is what they did. I’m not sure if this comforts me or worries me.
My mother had a saying ‘Never go up empty handed.’ This had nothing to do with acquiring virtue prior to one’s demise, sadly. It was the desperate cry of a woman who threw the newspaper away, while you were still reading it, who had inadvertently married an antique collector. From a very young age I had been trained to distract my mother while my father smuggled the latest antique shop find into the house.
My aunt, her eldest sister, was worse. If you ate at her house, the last piece of your fish finger was still on your fork, when the plate had been washed, dried and put back on the Welsh dresser. There was a hefty collection of Toby jugs, but they all lived on a picture rail, safely out of the way of being handled, admired or even looked at, if you were on the short side.
I look at the stack on the metal chest of drawers to my right. Two boxes away from the ceiling. I’m five foot one and still shrinking. I could be found entombed like some cut-price Tutankhamen, but instead of gold beds with leopard feet, my anti-room will be stacked with boxes full of twelve inch scrapbook papers, so that the excavators will produce fanciful wall art of me hunting wild scrapbooks in the marshes, in a self-steering shopping trolley, armed only with a stapler and paper trimmer.
I really do understand why people found charitable foundations. They probably do it because their own foundations are sinking under the weight of weight.
I am not a rich woman. This is a blessing. Can you imagine the amount of junk I could assemble if I had more money?
I still haven’t renovated the dolls’ house in the hall. I need to fix the missing panel, do the lights and put the furniture back in. Trouble is, I’ve moved on. Unlike the house which is still there.
I like making things.
I may have put my finger on the problem there.
Creativity. I had a friend who constantly complained that she was not creative like me. She had a tidy house. We fell out, having little in common.
My grandmother was creative. She knitted so well and so constantly people were glad to receive the things she made and gave to them. I still own entire sets of doll clothes she knitted, which reside in the loft. That’s the first full loft that came with the house. Not the second loft that I designed to house the show display overflow. It’s about a foot above the tall pile of stuff up the wall in the craft room.
I like writing.
Currently I prefer writing to tidying up.
I have cleared the stuff off the bed. Half the bedroom is nearly clear. Apart from the books, of course. The books have begun to migrate to the windowsills. Only because the book stacks had become dangerous.
I have vegetable trolleys (much smaller, and weaker) full of books I started writing. There’s a time-travel novel that I started writing about fifteen years ago. When I work out how to save the main character convincingly and get down to writing it again, the book itself will have time-travelled and all the topical references will need updating. Did HG Wells have this problem? I should pop on my exercise bike and ask.
And we have two sheds.
Mine is relatively empty. Just a table, a chair, a metal cabinet of tiny drawers and a broom, an extension lead and a marquetry picture made by my father which the OH promised long ago to turn into a table. That was, of course before the floor of his shed collapsed, being damp, under the weight of junk.
Back to the tidying, motivated.
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