Clutter

I sit surrounded by clutter, forever disproving any notion of my being obsessed with purest tidiness. It's almost impossible to work as a university lecturer or researcher without clutter. Random scraps of paper, flotsam and jetsam sail around some offices at smallest breezes and rumours of monsters in professorial offices long abandoned to masses of paper persist. Whole tribes of ants, inspired partly by the Discworld, have evolved into ink-consumers and build nests out of mouldering printouts. Academic owls of inspired mental acuity have been known to collate article discards and form cogent arguments that stump the otherwise untouchable biggest bigwigs.

'What kind of clutter can really accumulate?', you may wonder, and so I will provide examples that I have seen in recent times: A mass of Rubiks cubes of various sizes, a departmental flying disc, a giant die, piles of empty water bottles, a giraffe, books printed in the antediluvian era, and some string. And yes, it's really mostly my own clutter. Clutter accumulates, gets swept away, and then accumulates again. It's one of the great survivors of any institutional rearrangement or restructuring. In my office alone there is left over tat from at least three different versions of a nearby laboratory and packaging that may well have been used to pad luggage in the Titanic.

Clutter attracts clutter. The act of clearing clutter leads to a clutter of clearing. A cluttering clucker clearly clashes cleverly. Clutter can only be dealt with severely, so severely in fact that the result is an environment so spartan that it becomes inimicable to work or life or sanity.

Harmless clutter is good. Long live clutter! And my giraffe agrees. He's called Gerald, and is not clutter at all.

O.

PS Beware the tidy academic; 'tis unnatural and indecent. I have access to an angry mob for such people. Not only do they have forks and burning torches but also forklifts full of old receipts, expenses and Christmas cards from 1993.