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I’ve only been living in this house for 15 or 16 months and finally I nearly have my office space/snooker arena tidied up. It still felt a long way off this morning, but some rearranging and tidying today saw it get very close to looking orderly. If you ignore my tiny walk in cupboard where I am keeping my files and my stationery supplies, which is now more or less impossible to walk into, meaning I can only get a new pen out of there if I use crampons (I said crampons).
The snooker board has also become a repository for things that I don’t quite know where to put, so we can’t get back to the weekly frames just yet.
The biggest sticking point came with the various plugs and connecting wires that I have been storing for years in case they somehow become useful again. And I made a bold decision to finally throw most of them away. The majority of them are USB to what I can only describe as isosceles trapezoid. I have some devices that still use the thinner version of that trapezoid (things like kindles and rechargeable batteries are charged by them), but I am not sure I have anything that needs the bigger kind. And also USBs are themselves a bit rarer too. I decided therefore that I probably didn’t need over a dozen different kinds of these wires and threw all but two of them away (just in case). It felt good. And also bad and wasteful. But mainly good. I also kept one kind of each plug I had, because again, what are the chances of me having a piece of equipment that doesn’t already have a plug. Sure I might lose it somehow (I did once lose the plug to my projector for example), but will that happen more than once a decade? And will I not be able to just buy a new plug in that event?
I mean all I havre done is throw away a very few plugs and leads. I have tonnes of junk that I am hanging on to - might I one day require my utility bills from 2004? Or the mortgage statements for my first flat?
I DON’T KNOW.
So I must keep them.
Also they will be useful for the museum that is eventually set up to honour me. Not sure what that will be celebrating now, but I was pretty certain that it was going to happen when I was 14. If I am going to get it now I might have to commit a pretty serious crime.
So I am not sure you can call me Marie Kondo just yet, but after consulting Twitter about whether my big box of old CDs has any value I have decided to take them all down to a charity shop (though I have been slipping a few into the monthly draw prize box every month for ages now.
After a brief stint away from the Ftocean, I returned for another episode of Stone Clearing with Richard Herring. Wolfie had some trouble with the post-9am dogs and I got critiqued for not being on telly enough.
You can listen here.
And here’s that passage from Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England to prove the history of this noble band
"And in the fieldf are the folk known as ftone clearef, a ftrange band of vagabondf who doth labour be it day or nicht pulling the ftones from the foil. They doth their work naked af the day they waf birthed, fave for a garment made of heffian wich they doth wear around their netherf and codlingf. They worfhip falfe godf and are an affront to the Lord Jefuf and when difcovered are chafed from the townf and villagef and put if ftocfs or hanged from the treef with their ftonef in their pocketf. Never waf a man fo curfed and defpifed than these foil-coated waffockf."
It means a lot that this is an award voted for by fans of the genre. Thanks very much. It certainly puts Olivia Coleman's Oscar nomination into some kind of perspective.
