Hercules, if you ask me, had it easy. All he had to do to clear out the Augean Stables was get a god to run a river through it; a method not available to those of us who are still trying frantically to clear up the mess that follows anything festive.
Why it builds up so, I don’t know, nor why the chaos should focus particularly on the desk and papers of anyone trying to clear it up in order to work. How and why does it get like this in the first place?
There’s a tendency, I know, to think that one has dealt with a problem or a paper when you’ve put it in a desktop file marked URGENT.
As well as this, there’s the fact that from time to time someone tries to help, which in practice means stirring the whole thing up; and a fair amount, I suspect, of what my mother used to call “the innate perversity of inanimate objects”.
So we make a resolution not to be so sloppy and disorganised next time. Bulky and visible things waiting for attention are moderately easy to deal with – easier anyway than paper instructions – because you see them or trip over them, but the little bit of paper with the crucial address on it is only too easy to lose.
And then if you’ve any sense, you tell several friends where you’ve hidden that crucial bit of paper and hope that at least one of them will remember what you said.
Of course she may have written it down on a lost bit of paper, too… Oh well, we did what we could.
What do you think? Have your say below
