The Perils of Spring Cleaning

The room where I write is small. It was a child’s bedroom. Along one wall is my large oak desk, on which sits my computer. I bought the desk from a second-hand shop in Manchester when I was a PhD student. There is a date-stamp on the underside: 1953. My 71 year old desk is very sturdy and can be dissembled into three pieces; it has lived at ten different addresses with me. Around the rest of the room are four bookcases and two filing cabinets. Over the 22 years I’ve lived in this house, my writing room has accumulated masses of books, folders and papers. Indeed, these became so completely piled up that I could hardly turn around without knocking something over. So there had to be a sort out, and I embarked on it enthusiastically. But when you delve into piles of stuff that have been there for years, you find all sorts of things that you’ve forgotten about.

One of the first things I discovered were my notes from the first session of the Queen’s Writers’ Group that Ciaran Carson ever took. It was 7th October 2009, and Ciaran gave us a talk about Haiku. The next thing I found were notebooks from my first period in hospital as a cancer patient in April-June 2011. These notes were sparse and poignant, they took me back to the City Hospital at a time when I thought my life was at an end. In those dark days I mainly communicated with friends and family by email. I sent out bulletins from my hospital bed and got lots of replies from far and wide, as people were circulating the bulletins. But where were those emails now? Anxiously, I went to my computer and looked back. Yes, the emails were still there. There were hundreds. I read through them. It was emotional and humbling. I was thrust back into those terrible times, where I was the focus of so much care and support.

To be honest, I don’t remember seeing some of the messages before: well wishers from Australia and New Zealand, people trying to find out how the big operation had gone, people who went to Intensive Care and spoke to me... In fact I recall next to nothing of the aftermath of that operation. I was sedated for several days and then I was gripped by severe pain and distanced by morphine. And when I did come out of it, I found myself in a world where everything seemed to have changed. In truth, it had. But in the long run, it wasn’t for the worse.

I’m writing this at my desk. It’s still surrounded by books and papers. Happily there are many fewer piles than there were before, but there’s still plenty to do. So a note of warning about a sort out – you will get waylaid by the past. Spring cleaning is not a short process. Perhaps there is a need to go back, in order to go securely forward.