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Showing posts from November, 2011

The Plastic Dictators

My Utopian dream for the New Scotland is to be liberated from the tyranny of stuff. If you have ever had to crawl around the floor and contort yourself to reach into the gunk-filled areas of your home and investigate murky folding sofa beds to retrieve the item known as the ‘Polly pocket’, then you will begin to know what I mean. I sit amid a claustrophobic accumulation of stuff and wonder how this nylon and fake velvet coup happened. I can just remember the far off days when each room of the house, bought with the innocence of those days as a 20 year home not a financial investment, echoed with uncarpeted emptiness. I am to blame for the second hand kitch that began the clutter, but that came from an obsession with getting bargains and rescuing ‘must have’ flying duck sets from such emporia as the cancer shop in Stockbridge. I confess to losing the plot when I insisted in shipping, like so much emotional baggage, a deadweight of an enormous second hand piano from the Area 7 warehouse