Chaos theory

It's raining cats, dogs and an assortment of other furry animals but I needed a walk. Partly because I actually needed a walk, and partly because one of the more sensible options available to me had I not gone out was one of the many house cleansing projects lurking in the hinterland of my mind. They were on a list, then submitted to memory and finally pushed back, by a strangely effortless process of denial into the dark and dusty area of the subconscious usually reserved for guilt, dead bunnies and lost mental property. The fact that the idea even arose was because my friend S wrote on her blog about the chaos of her parent’s garage, a chaos in every way matched by the chaos in my mothers house where, for a little while at least, I reside.

In a fashion similar to that of my friend’s parents befuddlement regarding their Christmas decorations, we barely found ours this year. Easter decorations even less so, I let Easter pass me by wilfully. The mother was in Germany. The internet was down. I went to the pub to watch football with F and didn’t even eat an egg until internet and mum were both restored to me. So, wherever the Easter decorations are (and honestly, Easter decorations are just scary anyway) they are probably not located in the “cupboard under the stairs”, a place so crammed with… well, nobody knows… that it couldn’t even house a small wizard. Regardless of whether his trunk was a magic one or not. Chaos prevails in the nether regions of this house, and despite some honest efforts at reducing the… stuff!... that occupies most of the space, the cupboard under the stairs remains unmapped territory.

I am not the only one bothered and bewildered by this mysterious place: mum also has no idea. Its contents have not been exposed to daylight for a couple of decades and the man who knew, who in fact put the stuff there to be stored in the first place, has passed away. Without leaving a map. It is thought to contain toys, but even by the most liberal of estimations that would only account for half of the space. A lost treasure? Junk? Jimmy Hoffa? Clues to a childhood I have forgotten about? I will have to deal with it at some point, but until then I will continue to come up with creative excuses – right now I’m working on one which takes its point of departure in an anthropological stance. Quite simply: if we leave it there for long enough it stops being junk and becomes history. And I wouldn’t have to touch it for 200 years.

Now, the reason I needed a walk in the first place was the fact that I had spent an entire day in eager pursuit of employment. For eager read ambivalent and for pursuit read… surfing? It’s an employer’s market out there at the moment and the need to come up with ever more creative ways of selling myself to whoever might be persuaded to give me the honour of working for them makes me feel increasingly prostitutionalised. It’s a new word. I just made it up. And compared with looking for work the notion of clearing out the cellar seems positively uplifting.