Yes things are messy around here which is good, because today is Messy Tuesday!

To start with let us look at this corner of the living room. We have two large boxes filled with files and books for sale on Amazon respectively. On top of these lies an ancient piece of purple/pink tweed that I have yet to turn into an item of clothing (folks I’ve had it for over ten years.) Under this heap is an old coffee table my Grandfather made that needs some love, and beneath this, my giant accordion box with the accordion inside it, which rarely gets played since it is so inaccessible.

I would like to see this all sorted out, really I would. And there is certainly some half-hearted organisation taking place here; the files, the fact that there is specifically a box in my life where I put books I have no further use for and am therefore retiring to Amazon’s cheap section, etc. but perhaps these organisational elements are the very reason for the mess? You see, when I look at this I experience an overarching sense of ennui because it just hasn’t reached a critical point yet and so why should I tidy it up?

When I was a child my father taught me a way of tidying that has informed the development of this specific mess. When we left toys on the stairs/floor/etc. he would basically ignore them until he trod on a piece of lego or stickelbrick, perhaps in bare feet. This would then produce an extremely reactionary spree of tidying, in which he would grab the nearest box and throw everything into it. He would angrily label this box with something like ‘toys children have maliciously left in the hallway for poor unsuspecting Father to trip up and break his neck on’ or similar, and then place it on the hallway floor, shouting that we had ten minutes to come and reclaim our things before the box would be put away into the loft. This sounds much more terrifying than it actually was; we found it very funny. My Father is a jolly man and attempts at being stern in his parenting were most unconvincing. But clearly the boxing up of miscellaneous items is a habit I have absorbed from him and as we see from this pile of boxed items, this is a mixed blessing. While the boxes contain the unbridled power of raw mess, they also render the mess inert and space-consuming.

Contrastingly, we have this mess on top of the cooker. I had just cleaned the cooker completely when a batch of sushi rice spewed gelatinous mush everywhere. I felt genuinely victimised by this unnecessary attack on my cleaning and the crusty stain will probably remain where it is until I get over that.

Now for my last messy Tuesday corner, I present to you the top of the washing-machine which has Saturday night’s beers atop it plus some yogurt pots I have failed to cleanse appropriately since eating their contents. These are the recycling items that clog up my life. The yogurt pots I save to turn into planting pots, the beer bottles I rinse and then trot down to the glass recycling with. But they are so relentless in the way they accrue that I nearly always fall behind on the task of organising them.

I wonder what other messes people will decide to celebrate today for Messy Tuesdays? I have already celebrated the disarray of Lara’s bookshelves today, and enjoyed immensely this post about mess in the beside-the-bed area.

Looking at all these great photos of mess I find myself reassured that mess is indeed the new tidy.