For my part the affirmative nature of Messy Tuesdays has grown out of a long-cultivated belief that the most interesting, fascinating, exotic and wondrous things are luckily to be discovered right under our noses.

I believe that always wishing Reality was better and always thinking life happens elsewhere are ideas that do not bring us joy. The aspirational living trend is a perfect instance of this false promise. The idea that the good life lies somewhere else, sometime else – when we are tidier, when things are sorted, when we have more time, when the living room is finished etc. – is one that defers our delight in life, always setting it just out of reach. Messy Tuesdays are for me a confirmation that we can delight in things as they are, without feeling the need to criticise or limit the imaginative potential of the immediate moment. Every week when people post about their mess – about how it got there, why it got there and what the future of the mess potentially is – I feel connected to the reality of homes and habitation in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible for a non-tactile communicative medium. In descriptions of unmade beds, unironed laundry, old potting sheds, disordered craft corners and unwashed dishes, the sense of ‘home’ is tangible.

It is for this reason that I decided I wanted to feature Messy Tuesdays as part of The Fantastical Reality Radio Show. Commissioned by The Sonic Arts Network and RadioReverb, this is a project I’m working on now with Kayla Bell and Claudia Figueiredo of Mundane Appreciation, and is basically a giant, audio-based celebration of life-as-it-is. There is lots more information about the show and what we plan to feature on it over at the Myspace page and also the Facebook group and as soon as I finish building it, we’ll have our own, shiny new website at www.fantasticalreality.com. I hope that the name conveys the joyful tangle of imaginative (fantastical) and observable (reality) elements that I hope this show will draw together and that it will ultimately have an affirmative and celebratory effect, comparable to the effect Messy Tuesdays seems to have had amongst its participants…

…so what do you think? I’d love to interview you about your mess or have you submit an audio description of your mess, or a recording of you making a mess! I’d like to come and see your mess for myself, talk to you about it and record our conversation. I’d like to interview people about mess, about Messy Tuesdays, about the sonic potential of mess (imagine the music one could make from the contents of an abandoned old drawer?!) and about the imaginative, chaotic joy that is mess. I’m really open to taking it in any direction anyone suggests, but it has to ultimately be appropriate for Radio and to fit within a relatively small section of time – say 8 minutes, tops. You guys have made Messy Tuesdays into this glorious, uncontainable thing, so I’d like to leave it open to you to suggest how it may be made into Radio content. Please email me your Messy Tuesday Radio Feature suggestions or leave them in the comments box below! I will get back to everyone who comments.

Back to the immediate issue of mess, today I am going to embrace my true destiny as one of life’s most gifted hoarders. In the discipline of hoarding I am perhaps one of the most accomplished persons that I know; my personal ability to collect crap and then refuse to throw it away is astonishing.

Observe, for example, this large plastic bag filled with office-waste, papers and reciepts:

I have devised an elaborate system for recycling such things. The existence of my “brilliant” system means I feel like a traitor for throwing away any waste paper and thus it lives here, waiting patiently for me to rouse my recycling apparatus into life.

My recycling apparatus, incidentally, is this paper shredder which sadly only despatches one sheet of paper at a time and which needs short rests inbetween its bouts of frankly ineffective labour.

Once the paper has been shredded, it goes into a large box with other shredded paper, and once the box is full, I will soak the paper and press it using my briquette maker, into solid paper fuel for use in the open fires during winter and my stove, if I ever find anywhere to put it in the studio. You can see the box beside the bag, there on the right.

The shreddings would also make very nice paper if anyone had a mould and deckle. I have decided not to invest as one as the last thing I need is another “project” but if anyone has one, they’re welcome to these lovely, officey shreds. The briquettes will be very compact and easy to make from the shreddings. To continue in the theme of reuse and recycle, you’ll see that on top of the box, there is a basket. This basket is full of plastic packaging that I intend to employ for the planting of seedlings. The shelf above the basket is in fact full of seedlings already thriving in yogurt pots, mushroom trays and pots that once held pasta sauce. The question is, just how many seedlings do I plan to plant?

You’ll have noticed that near my shredder is a star-shaped hot water bottle. If you didn’t, here it is again:

That clear plastic bag on top of it once held some fat free, dry, vanilla-ish biscuits I got in the Asia market. I have no idea if they are still reasonably healthy to eat if you devour most of the packet in a single sitting, but their presence on my desk is self-explanatory: work munchies. The star-shaped hot water bottle? There is no reason for it to be here except that it makes me happy to look at it, even if we are now entering a time of year when no such item will be necessary. Underneath my workstation there is a ticket printing machine that I am supposed to be selling on ebay for my brother and some sewing projects left aside from The Missability Radio Show, including one half-pimped Guide Dog Harness for the Pimp My Guide feature of the show.

It is amazing how much stuff I’ve managed to squirrel away in here, but I’m also learning that this tendency towards collecting stuff is also a huge creative resource. Threads of organisation (albeit messy) run through the way things are put together in this space and the key word to it all is process. I am interested in the process of things… in the life cycle of paper, in the growing of things, in the slow cultivation of long-term projects and in making a life’s work. This mess is a sort of accumulation of the world’s puzzles according to Felix. I hoard things because they make me think and until the thought is sorted out, the thing stays. The paper will stay while I continue to ponder the issue of recycling and landfill. The seedlings will stay as long as I cultivate a garden. The knitted cakes and objects will stay until I understand why I like them so much. The teatowels will stay until I have sorted out my Washing-Up audio project. The hot water bottle will stay until I have the thought to move it. And if I’m not having that thought right now it’s because I’m having another thought… a thought about affirmation, about social change, about celebrating life as it is. A thought about The Fantastical Reality Radio Show.

Who’s in and up for it?