The mess

I'm a pretty neat and tidy person. I like order in my life, something you may have guessed with my 'ode to a list' type blogs. My love of order extends to my surroundings. I don't like mess.

This is not to be confused with some kind of minimalist ideal that I have. Oh no no. I just like things to have a place. At first sight I would understand how someone would say I was lover of clutter but I'm really not. Clutter is when you have a load of crap hanging about. On the contrary everything I own is in its place. Everything has its home.

At this point I feel I should probably point out that I'm not some crazy Kathy Bates in Misery type person that can walk in to my living room and shout "My penguin is facing South when it should be facing South-East!" I just mean that my things have a home and their home tends to be logical.

Take the elephant for instance. The elephant is with the giraffe. This makes sense. They are wild safari type animals. They belong together. They are under the shade of a plant because it gets hot out in the desert, they need shade. No no, I'm joking, I'm not really that bad. Honestly.

This delight in order means that I'm not really a messy person, I don't like mess. It confuses me and makes claustrophobic and bizarrely angry. I don't know why. I just see it and makes me mad. Probably at myself for being messy but whatever or whoever I'm mad at, it's not a nice feeling.

However since moving the flat I've found that I've suddenly become a messy person. Either that or my small mounds of mess that I make are breeding behind my back and multiplying to make huge mounds of mess. Maybe I'm not innately tidy and my neat habits were forced upon me by my environment.

The rooms I lived in at uni ranged from a pretty decent size to crazily small and I had to come up with all kinds of inventive ways to be tidy and clean. Laundry had to be done on a day when I wasn't planning to be in my room because there wasn't room for me and the airer in the same place at the same time. And no I most certainly was not going to waste my precious 20ps on the tumble driers in the laundry room. I'd have only ended up shrinking everything anyway. When I was living with my Mum, my room was also small; if you didn't hang your work clothes up immediately after coming in from work you found your available floor space cut in half.

So now I have a whole flat to live in? Things seem to have got a little bit crazy. Everywhere I go there's mess! I come back home after work and find myself going around picking up things and putting them away and the most frustrating thing is that I can't blame any of this on my boyfriend! It's all mine!

Why have I randomly put down a book on the dining room table when clearly it belongs on either a bookshelf or the bedside table? What are my headphones doing on this chair? It doesn't matter if no-one sits on the chair. That's not where they belong! Why exactly are there a pair of pants and socks on the floor when the laundry hamper is clearly within throwing distance?

That's why I'm almost certain that the mess is either a) cloning itself or b) tiny gremlins are coming in to the flat while I'm out and chucking everything all over the place.

Whatever or whoever it is I'm on the look out for you. I will not accept that I'm not a tidy and neat person. I've merely let things get out of control slightly. It's time to rein it in.

Right I'd better go and tidy up the kitchen. Don't even get me started on who's making the mess in there...