tidying

The Noble Art of Chucking Things Away

Sadly, not everything can simply be got rid of in the recycling. What’s the first thing I did on the first day of 24 hours of freedom? I threw things away. And it was glorious. A wad of flashcards as thick as an Oxford dictionary, endless rain-softened folders, reams of posters of declensions and gender rules and plural endings, collected up, divested of blutack and chucked into a crate. Arbitrarily symbolical, now dead flowers mouldering in the bin. Entire notebooks tossed with lascivious joy into the recycling pile. Replaced with strings of flowers, posters of shapes and colours, or sheer...