going, going...

There is yet one more post that I am hoping to make, either later today or early tomorrow. It is one that has been hiding in the wings for some time, waiting for its turn. Unfortunately, after it has made its appearance I shall be going off-line for a while. For how long, exactly, I am not sure, the reason being that my junk / computer / painting room is to be redecorated. To make matters worse, our decorator has brought forward his start date to Monday. Part of me queries the wisdom of this project, but in essence it an attempt to reclaim our last outpost of disorder for civilization. For the past week or so, between bouts of incapacity caused by a chest condition, I have been consigning books, bits of equipment and other paraphernalia to various forms of temporary storage. A God-sent opportunity to get rid of junk and clear the decks for a new order, you might think...

This morning over coffee I am reading that the Museum Association is trying to persuade its members to do exactly what I have been doing: it wants them to consider selling and / or simply removing unwanted artifacts from their storerooms as a first step to making their collections more dynamic. Unheard of heresy! The big curatorial No-No! Apart from the curator's first commandment of retention, absorbed with the first drops of their mothers' milk and with every breath taken since then, there is, as I have discovered, a practical disincentive: what happens during such a clear-out is that car load after car load (lorry load in their case)of stuff that "could be useful at some time in the future" is removed to some dump or disposal point without the remaining pile of jumble ever growing any smaller. The sole achievement, it seems to me, is that in the new, enlightened order, most of the surviving articles cannot be found.

There is a plus, of course: during the demolition of the old organized chaos, long-lost or long-forgotten books, manuscripts and artifacts of many kinds are rescued from oblivion and restored to some sort of prominence in the heap.

I will not say adieu good friends, as I may yet inflict this one more post upon you. (Trying hard, in my present condition, to avoid words like final or last, you understand!)