Creativity v Domesticity: you won't find an orchid in a roller-striped lawn.

Families, like fairy tale bears, have their habitual seats. Mine is at one end of a 1930s sofa. Nicotine-yellowed, it soaked up the smoke that my grandma’s lungs did not. This sofa is actually my desk. One end is confettied with notes and stuff.

  In the surrounding room objects are not privileged or displayed, they are beached: old greetings cards, papery flowers on the mantel, the drift of ashes in the hearth; a dead bonsai’s wintry charm. Their outlines mingle like flotsam and seaweed. Webs thicken and droop like vines, and the dust, as Quentin Crisp said, gets no worse after three years. Things wait to be put away: a pop-up festival tent, the African-snail-that-didn’t-thrive’s plastic tank, a frisbee left by a visiting dog. Fortunately things are infinitely patient because they do not die. It’s just as well because given the choice of a pen or a duster I seize the pen. I don't do tidy - small, vinegar-mouthed word.

I am messy and I have no guilt. (Reminds me of the Patti Smith song: ‘my knees are open to the sun, I seek pleasure' etc. I doubt she straightened the antimacassars before she wrote it.)
If you do have guilt you must be female. Drop it. If you need convincing there are plenty of studies which show that messiness provokes creativity. Disorder can trigger creative solutions. Order is associated with rigid thinking. A disordered environment has depth and history, archaeological layers and surprises. Clutter is interesting. Dirt is a maligned character. It is as beneficial as it is pathological. It nourishes a strong immune system and a diverse biome. Air fresheners and cleaning chemicals lodge in the body with a half-life somewhere between plutonium-244 and a seaborne carrier bag.

I have visited homes as bland and minimal as the local Nationwide. Banks with their clear, clean surfaces don’t taste of anything. You could lick the glass, the wall, the carpet. The only difference would be the texture. I don’t want to live in a bank. I don’t think I could write in one. Einstein famously said: ‘If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?’

Of course there’s clutter and clutter. There’s the chaos of a Mumbai rubbish tip and there’s the ordered disorder of a non-linear mind; a sophisticated, highly individual filing system that cannot be reduced to algorithms. It nourishes the random, the providential, the serendipitous, the inspired.
Organic and organised have the same root. Ordered disorder is nature’s way. Ordered order is topiary, borders, selective planting. Ordered disorder is a meadow where everything finds its symphonic niche and somewhere in the grass is a single wild orchid. You won’t find an orchid in a roller-striped lawn.

Some of my ordered disorder, enhanced by a broken horn in the log basket and a part-lobotomised Gandalf on the hearth.

Novelty junky

There's a list in The Huffington Post of 18 things creative people do differently. They:

daydream, observe everything, work the hours that work for them, take time for solitude, turn life’s obstacles around, seek out new experiences, ‘fail up’, ask big questions, people watch, take risks, view life as an opportunity for self-expression, follow their true passions, get out of their own heads, lose track of time, surround themselves with beauty, connect the dots, make time for mindfulness.

Last night I was tired and hungry. So why, after a day’s work, did I go to the Bristol Balloon Fiesta nightglow, alone in the rain?

The faces were beautiful in the dusk, so many, so various, so many heads carrying so many stories. The movements of children, lifting smoothly from the churned grass for a better view, orbiting their parents like electrons buzzing heavy nuclei. The beautiful Japanese girl sitting cross-legged on the grass, great symmetry to her face, mouth like a bruise, steals a chip from a boy, swirls it in salsa, eats. The voice of an android ‘Seven minutes to inflation.’ Manic bulb-studded fairground. Cold, quiet trees. The people organism commutes the walkways. A boy twirls a liquorice lace, catches the end in his mouth, ingests in gathers. The fudge tent, like a building yard for sugar igloos. ‘One minute to inflation.’ The flaccid casings ripple and begin to rise with a giant’s breath. Puff, they grow. I’ll huff and I’ll puff. Hemispheres rising. Full and lovely they rise, a dozen air balloons. In the crowd miniatured balloons on a thousand phone screens. The balloons glow, fired in synchrony. The music, M-people, ‘I can feel my soul ascending.... what have you done today to make you feel proud,’ a West country anthem, ‘Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby,’ the crowd sing ‘oo-ar, oo-ar, oo-ar.’

The balloons shrink and sink becoming cloths, just as ghosts become sheets, dolls and clowns lose their night-time animation, and the human spirit fleas the body. The sky explodes.

It was irresistible to me because I'm a novelty junky and it ticked at least half of the boxes above. There it was: rain turned to atmospheric beauty, people-watching, new experiences, observing everything, out of my head, solitude in a crowd, mindful, forgetful of time, connecting dots and asking questions. Oo-ar.