I spent last week tidying my desk. Not all week, I hasten to add. Just in case anyone important on the paper is reading this (unlikely, I know), I wish to make it clear that I was also extremely busy with a number of high-powered, potentially award-winning projects. But a portion of the week, quite a substantial portion, was spent tackling the desk.
This happens a couple of times a year, usually around the time that I can no longer locate my computer terminal for debris, or when the area gets taped off and declared a disaster zone and I am ordered to clear it up or clear off. This time the tidy-up was prompted by notification of a workstation assessment. I suspected that my assessor might want to see the workstation.
After several hours of excavation I struck wood. I had dug right down to a late-second-millennium Ikea desktop with genuine 20th-century coffee stains. I discovered the source of peculiar smells that had been intriguing me: an old trainer and some fossilised orange peel. There was almost certainly nothing dead in there. I felt very pleased with myself.
Then I made the mistake of exploring the inch-high space beneath the bookcase that marks the boundary between my territory and that of Anj, my colleague. Now that I was sitting at my lovely clean desk, I viewed the landscape inhabited by Anj with smug concern. Great towers of books and magazines sat atop soaring mountains of yellowing newspapers. Anj’s world looked perilous. I imagined attempting to retrieve a book. You might trigger a landslide and never be seen again.
I found a great river of stuff being forced down underneath the bookcase through to my side. Something had got in there of such toxicity that it had turned a plastic bag to powder. Aren’t plastic bags supposed to last a thousand years? You are probably thinking: untidy desks, untidy minds. And in my case the adage may be true. But Anj, a science writer . . ? I asked her if she thought she was suffering from an obsessive-compulsive disorder. She thought about this carefully.
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“I do chuck things away,” she claimed. “But not as much as I should perhaps. I lose stuff less often than people with tidy desks. There’s method in my madness. I don’t think I could work at a tidy desk.”
Her theory is that as a scientist you have to surround yourself with ideas to produce other ideas. “From the clutter will emerge the new idea,” she said. It is a nice theory which I intend to borrow.
I don’t think I have OCD. It’s not as if I’m keeping 300 cats or something. I used to hate throwing anything away. But before we got married my wife got tough. I had to choose between her and the half-completed 1970s Manchester United sticker books. It was a close-run thing, but in the end they went. Now I have only a few boxes of stuff containing priceless memorabilia, such as 25-year-old copies of Roy of the Rovers.
There was a terrible story recently about a woman in the US who was reported missing, then found dead in her house, buried under ceiling-high piles of clothes and clutter. Her husband said it appeared that she had been looking for the phone when she perished. I couldn’t
help but think of this when the workstation assessor concluded that my desk was fine and made a move to walk around to Anj’s domain. I managed to send her off in another direction. Who knows what would have happened? It will have to be cleared, of course. It’s not fair on the rest of us who keep the place tidy.
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damian.whitworth@thetimes.co.uk