I am Spring Cleaning in my Lewes study – but can I really throw away my toys?

Yes, I know, my study is in a mess – I have been busy revising and compiling my poetry into a “definitive” collection. Well definitive until the next changes. Consequently there are papers everywhere and it got so that I had to walk over a poetry path just to get into the room.

So I have started the great tidy-up hoping to make this space orderly without being clinically uncreative I hope.

The muddle that was a worryingly random heap of unopened letters is now a large but accessible in-tray.

All those discarded versions of poems have ended up sorted into piles and secured with elastic bands.

Those old magazines has been put into piles ready for a final read or, more likely,  the recycling.

Then it is the dreaded moment when I open my drawers…..they are full of useful things but the trouble is there is so much in there that I seldom dare to open them up. Well today I am going to see what I really need to keep.

I have had this bouncy ball for years and it does still bounce. Can I really throw it away?

And, laugh if you must, I do like this small wooden spinning top which I got from a Christmas cracker so long ago that Charles Dickens might have been still alive.

There is something very calming about spinning it on my desktop. I just can’t chuck it.

Now, juggling balls are great and I would really love to be able to do it but I have owned these for a very long time and I am still useless at it. Is it time, I wonder, to finally give up on them?

Not my yo-yo though…..I need the simple pleasure of setting it into motion and seeing how long I can keep it ascending and descending especially today with the sun catching its gaudy plastic.

Already, it has seduced me away from the Spring Clean but it is definitely not going to the bin.

Now what about my Baoding Balls – Chinese stress balls with bells inside? They too had a calming therapeutic effect once I knew how to use them. At first, when I was given them, I was shocked thinking that they were an ancient sex aid. Actually you manipulate them in the palm of your hands and they work as a form of acupressure. Hmm….I’ll have a little practice now. They can’t go either.

Maybe I own too many calming toys but they do the trick even if seeing them all together again makes me wonder if I am really as neurotic as that or whether I am really just a fidget looking for distractions.

As you can see though – I am well on my way to a new and satisfying orderliness here in sunny Lewes. Now my desk is nearly as blank as my mind.

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