Who remembers Messy Tuesdays?

This morning I have briefly enjoyed re-reading about the various messes that people have honoured and mentioned in the past, and posts about messy knitting needle-jars, bags of selvedge, unwashed dishes etc. have given me hope and made me feel that I am not alone in my struggle with STUFF.

It has been a while since the messy corners of my life got their justly deserved Tuesday mention, but today the vista of my flat has prompted me back into Messy Tuesdays glee.

It is insane what happens when you get the last of your stuff from an old place and dismantle an exhibition. The result is many, many, many posessions without homes, piles of boxes and unrelenting overwhelm.

The saving grace to my endless process of making freecycle listings, unpacking boxes and finding homes for everything, is the re-emergence of my music collection. Rescued from the obscurity of the now derelict studio, my CDs are now accessible again. And with all my sound equipment retrieved from Gallery 10 with the end of Love is Awesome, I have been able to reinstate Music in my life and it does help with the tidying. I love my CDs… everything from Madonna to Peter Cusack to Rachel Unthank and the Winterset…

I love CD collections so much that I decided one of the features for BBC Oxford’s The Hub ought to be about people’s disregarded music collections. I am therefore producing and editing the Office Raid feature, in which messy offices get their CD collections pillaged for sonic interest. Below I have attached an early version of last week’s Office Raid. Part of mess is piles of CDs that nobody listens to anymore. Like other kinds of mess, these are potentially a rich imaginative resource and I love the way that a disorganised archive of amazing music is always around us on the shelves of people in the music biz.

But there is a point when mess impedes on creativity, so I will tidy onwards, happy that I took a pause to acknowledge and share right here, my Messy Tuesday, and fully boosted by the joys of Feist, Santogold, and other sonic support.