(Un) Like A Rolling Stone

www.paulcoia.com

Self awareness seems a good thing to have, don’t you think? Knowing your strengths and weaknesses should, in theory, stop you from blundering in and volunteering to programme the Sat Nav on NASA’s flights to Mars or putting rubber gloves on when the surgeon starts flagging during an open heart procedure. But then if self awareness really worked it would also mean no one ever singing karaoke.

I thought I was reasonably self aware until this week, but now I’m left wondering after reading about a complete nutter in Australia who is obsessed by collecting very strange things and, even though he’s obviously a sink plunger short of a Dalek, I had the horrible realisation that I may just be a bit like him.

He admitted to Australian newspapers that thirty years ago he became fascinated by his belly button fluff and had decided to keep it in a jar with the idea that he could, one day, save enough to stuff a pillow. Now that he’s older, he finds himself disappointed that three decades of fluff still only fill four jars and that he’s going to have to add the five bags of beard trimmings he’s saved to fill out his cushion.

He would get on well with Darren Smith of Exeter who admitted this week that his particular collecting bug was causing friction at home. The data analyst has been amassing Lego bricks since he was five and wants to use his thirty years of learning which bit slots in where to cause a different type of friction with his wife Claire and start a family. However, Claire is keeping the lid on her toybox firmly closed until he gets rid of every single one of the two million plastic bricks currently filling their home.

Now none of the above is like me really except that I do store and hoard daft things, and I collect almost anything. Even on my computer I store junk. Want a good ad lib to start a speech? Come to my laptop and look up Speech Openers and you’ll find a whole list, headed by “There’s an old tradition in showbusiness. But I prefer girls.” The awfulness of that line makes you realise just how long I’ve been collecting them.

Has collecting changed over the years? My grandfather, an inveterate smoker, used to collect old, cracked pipes while today George Michael collects old crack pipes. But the principle is the same – the reluctance to let something go because one day it just might come in useful.

I recently did a clearout of my office and found old cassettes I’d hoarded from years ago. The fact I don’t have a cassette player in the house should have made me dispose of them but they just might have come in useful. Perhaps unspooling them and leaving the tape around the garden could have strangled a few squirrels.

I still have birthday cards from my twenty first party, Christmas cards from when I was a kid and a post office saving book given to me when I was born. My school slide rule sits in a box next to my sports medals and report cards. I have a collection of DVDs that I’ll never watch again, torn wrapping paper I might be able to reuse, and every single Oor Wullie and The Broons cartoon annual of the past twenty five years. If you’ve ever read these books you’ll know they only have one or two story lines that get repeated so I have, basically, thousands of cartoon stories, all of them the same. But one day I’m sure I’ll find a use for them.

My wardrobe is full of old T shirts which may serve one day as dusters, and tatty shirts which might be useful for my kids’ art classes, and so on. Why can’t I just be a grown up and throw them out?

Even my office shelves are groaning with every single copy of a news magazine called The Week stretching back eleven years. I always felt that, one day, I’d get a column in some newspaper and it would be great to look up world events as research. But the chances of my column ever happening are as likely as the Dalai Lama appearing on Wife Swap so they just lie there taking up space.

My wife should have called social services by now but I think she just looks on me as her “putting something back” by looking after the sick in the head. Yet even she had enough the other day when she opened a cupboard and all my old shoes fell over the floor. As I explained, you never know when they’ll come back in fashion. Today I discovered she’s hidden one shoe from every pair.

When I turned twenty three, for some reason I decided to start collecting The Times newspaper on every June 19th, the idea being that one day I’d look back and remember what was happening in the world on all my birthdays. I’ve even started doing it for my kids with every birthday edition since they were born. But they don’t know about it as I haven’t told them, mainly because I’m reluctant to give the papers up. So, what’s the point?

I guess the real point is that there is no point. So, if you’re like I am, my advice would be that it’s time to part with your stuff and clear a space. Painfully gather up whatever it is you collect and get rid of it. You’ll feel better in the long run.

And make sure you give me a call. I’ll find a home for it in one of my cupboards.