I was just reading an article about
hoarding items. The writer hoards magazines, hundreds of them, "piling up three feet high, all around the perimeter of my living room." I too collect magazines. My issues of
Careless Talk,
The Illustrated Ape, all those free magazines I pick up from music shops like
Fact and
Three. Like my books, I go to great lengths to keep them in perfect condition. I don't know what purpose their long-term storage could hold, but I can't bear to let go of them.
The writer also says she used to store her old e-mail messages, something else I also do. All the sent messages (often useful when I can't remember what I've said and to who) and all the personal messages I receive (much less useful). I've kept all the personal letters and cards I've ever received since I was 10, they sit in the bottom drawer of my chest of drawers. I keep all the boxes of prescribed medication I take, though I am planning on using that in an art project of some sort, I haven't decided what yet. I collect advertising postcards, they wallpaper my hallway. Alongside the postcards are items of paper which other people have given me - notes and the like. Memorabilia. I refuse to throw away my old college notes and text books. They'll come in useful someday, honest. I suppose it's a part of me that I'm archiving, a section of my past. The folders and notes are covered in scribbles and doodles, they show me for who I was at that point in time, I don't just want to lose it to eternity. And of course I collect books. Rarely I might give one away, when I feel I have no more use for it. I like some badges, I have a lot of them on a bag. They say things like "So what's so unusual about a man walking round saying he's the son of God?", "I'm in love with a BOY this time" and "The revolution starts at closing time." Most of them are band badges though - Bawl, Belle and Sebastian, Bearsuit, GoJonnyGoGoGoGo and so on. I keep old diaries, not the journal type, but the appointment kind. Again they're covered in scribbles, and occasionally they're useful when I need to look up someone's old address or phone number. I also have a shoe box full of useless ephemera I've collected throughout the years. Without looking in it, it contains items like a pottery thumb pot I made in school when I was 12, a straw from a branch of MacDonalds I visited when on a French school trip when I was 12, a programme from the first football game I went to, my Karate license (I haven't practiced karate in at least 10 years), the set of 3D glasses I had from Children In Need ten years ago or so, little notes which were passed between friends in school lessons, some dolphin-shaped bath pearls, the significance of which I no longer remember, old score sheets from playing Quasar. Useless things but things that (on the whole) have meaning for me. An ever-growing personal time capsule almost.
It's strange, the things I choose to keep.
23:04
