I should probably have been working on the show, but instead spent much of the late afternoon and evening tidying up my office. I have been doing this on and off for my entire life, but over the last few months been making a concerted effort to get everything in the right place, before usually abandonning things at a stage where they were a lot more messy than they'd previously been.
But today I very nearly cracked it, even getting to the stage where I got into drawers and boxes and worked out if they were as well organised as possible. And I went so deep that I actually found a pretty much full bottle of Tippex in one drawer. I have no idea why I still have that, as it's a pretty much useless commodity in 21st Century Britain, nor can I imagine when I last used it - it must be a quarter of a century since I had a type-writer or was writing anything by hand that needed to be so "neat" that correcting fluid was required. I almost certainly stole it from the BBC Radio Light Entertainment stationery cupboard in the early 90s and somehow it has stayed with me ever since. And now, it feels like such an antique that although my initial reaction was to put it in the bin I actually decided to keep it and ultimately placed it in a box of treasured memories including old passports and tiny gifts and photos and letters from friends and loved ones. Somehow that felt appropriate to preserve this item, which was briefly a world-conquering phenomenon, before technology overtook it and it became consigned, if not quite to a museum (I think you can still get it), but to becoming a niche product.
As schoolkids, even though we didn't type, we usually had a bottle of Tippex in our pencil cases, ostensibly to be used to make minor corrections to essays (Oh, the sweet pain of having to wait for it to dry - how often I would put my pen back on the Tippexed mistake too early and burst the white bubble and either leave a scruffy, broken mark or have to attempt to add another bobble of the stuff and start to create a 3D abstract scultpure on my page), but mainly to graffiti desks and Adidas sports bags or folders. Do kids still do that? Of course not. Do they even use pens now. It's all done with computers linked to their brains which just ascertain what they know and give them an instant grade. And then if they don't know enough, just adds memory circuits into their heads which give them all the info that they require .
Tippex does not seem to have its own website - I just typed in www.tippex.com and it took me to the website for Bic. Who do make correcting fluid, but it doesn't seem to be Tippex branded. Odd.
Anyway, I was mainly astonished to discover that my hoarding instincts had caused me to hold on to this fading bottle and surprised to see that it was still liquidy inside - some less ancient Pritt Stick had not fared so well. And now I will keep it in my box of nick-nacks which I will store away and look over very occasionally. Hopefully I will forget it's in there and next time I look another decade will have passed and it will seem ever more like an archaeolgical relic and it will make me laugh again.
Though my little box of memories itself contains items that I can not remember the provenance of, or who gave them to me, or why I kept them. They seemed important at the time and I am sure I assumed I would always remember their relevance, or the friend or lover they represented, but mostly I have no idea. I didn't throw them away though. I kept them in my box of largely forgotten memories. They still represent my life, even if I do not know what they represent.
I do squirrel a lot of stuff away, which will be useful for me if I want to explore any more autobiographical ideas. But with death in my mind I felt a little bit sad that almost certainly when I go most of these trinkets will be just thrown in a skip. That's as it should be, I suppose. I basically have an office full of boxes full of rubbish. But that box of stuff (itself a bit of a time capsule, because although I added a little bit to it today, I haven't added anything to it for about ten years as I'd forgotten about it) will mean even less to whoever goes through my possessions than some of it means to me. Maybe they'll pick out a photo, or some playbill with a famous name on it. But ultimately it's going in the furnace, just like me. Maybe I should insist that I am cremated atop a mound of burning receipts and photos and forgotten scripts and letters from people that even I can barely recall. A sort of mixture of Viking and Egyptian rituals. You take all your worldly goods with you, but they are burned with you.
Anyway my office, aside from a few empty boxes on the floor, is pretty much in order now. Of course within a couple of months it will be messed up again, or I'll have a better idea of where to store particular items. Though I realised that I have more pencils than I could conceivably ever use in this lifetime, even if I spent the rest of my days only writing in pencil. Will the person who goes through my stuff when I am dead keep the pencils or just throw them on my pyre? Will pencils seem as archaic as Tippex by then? Are our lives just about accumulating junk which some of our sexcrement will throw away?
Oh, and I didn't totally waste my day. I also recorded
frame 36 of Me1 Vs Me2 Snooker. And with an exciting leap forward in technology I used a lavalier radio mic so that you can hear all the participants without them having to shout across the room. It's the sort of advance that the sport has been resisting, but if we want it to compete with other self-playing sports then we have to move into the 20th Century.
