The hills ought to be enough. Their splendour is clear and painters and poets could lead me by the hand through every life, every unique life, which has been caught in their shadow.

Instead I turn to another country as a book by Tove Jansson (of Moomin fame) shows me not the majestic beauty of Wordsworth but the ordinary lives of a tiny collection of people in a Swedish hamlet. And it is this sense of the ordinary that most captivates me because it is something I strive for whenever I write or whenever I start my working day.

Take this sentence:

People woke up late because there was no longer any morning.

How ordinary. How extraordinary. In context it is a simple sentence relating the behaviour of people caught in the long darkness of winter. This is Sweden, remember. A simple sentence gives us a simple behaviour and a complex insight into the people who exhibit it.

From the ordinary activity of sleeping in late to the extraordinary people who do so, there is always something more in every detail.

We just need to find it.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

The more I think about The Museum of Whatnot the more I see myself and the process that brought it to my attention. This isn’t going to be a post about the usefulness of Twitter – I’ll leave that to other people or another day. It’s more about the way in which I use Twitter as a stream in which to stand. I’m happy not to get too caught up in it, not to collect each and every post from people like Jonathan and I wonder if that’s common. Because if it is then are other people, like me, eschewing the collecting of other things? Do people still collect stuff to litter their homes with? Or is this idea being replaced by purchase and disposal as we invest our finances in consumer electronics and transitory entertainments?Is de-cluttering just another way of urging us to forget the past and buy into the future?

To give you an example or two, I’ve just signed up to Spotify. Where will this leave my desire to collect music? I used to enjoy owning the LP, then the CD, then I was content to have a hard drive full and move my CDs to the attic. If I were to get a Kindle then would my room busting collection of books go a similar way (and then how would I respond to late night discussions in which I currently often dart into another room and come back with an old paperback)?

Even as I type I’m aware that pressing the publish button consigns these thoughts to an archive, soon to be trawled by a diminishing number of people. But then, maybe that’s where the pleasure truly lies – of being one of just a handful of people who discover that dusty museum and then share the rarest of loves.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.