The miscellaneous invasion
“The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.”
John Galsworthy
After reluctantly eschewing materialism for 3 months like a grumpy Buddhist monk, I was finally reunited today with all of my earthly possessions, and Bagpuss, of course. How can I forget my favourite unnecessarily twee hot water bottle? That’s encouraging, because during this time I had completely obliterated all memories of my current life inventory, and had instead been left with the unsatisfactorily vague ‘some stuff’. It turned out to be quite a lot of stuff. Too much stuff in fact. After months of pining for my salad bowl and my Hungarian geese feather pillows, nostalgia had clouded my memories and I had become blissfully ignorant of all the accompanying clutter that humans seem to accumulate and that had now followed me to Germany.
A mountain of paper, literally.
It’s not just the take away menus that were packed down in the confused flurry that was relocation, although I wonder if they will still deliver having yet to come across a decent curry house here. It’s all those homeless hairpins, forlorn cables, lonely birthday candles, novelty freeze magnets and half empty paracetamol packets that seem to cover your bedside table, lurk in your kitchen drawers and populate your desk, plotting world domination while you sleep. Before you know it, all your flat surfaces will be invaded by this tiny miscellaneous army, composed of seemingly innocuous trinkets hell-bent on colonizing the back of your sofa. You’ll spend the rest of your life moving stuff from one surface to another, unable to eradicate it. This is because clutter is not immune to the first law of thermodynamics - random crap can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms.
On the bright side, I now have my Wii and most importantly, my Wii Fit, which I will now assiduously use once again, after having become the Kaiserin Käse.
