Yesterday I made the argument that the most interesting thing that happened recently in my life is the addition of a bookshelf in my room.
Let me fill you in. For months my room had been in a state of complete chaos looking more like a warzone than an inhabitable place. All over the floor laid the leftovers from a war between clothes and books that had used all things available as their arsenal. On the floor laid the corpses of dirty clothes, half-read books and paper I no longer had any use for. Cables ran around the floor like snakes tangled in everything that dared come close enough. In between all this monstrosity laid all manners of garbage. The already, by definition, disgusting wall-to-wall carpet had gathered dust like bloodshed from the fallen.
At the same time as this slo-mo decay had taken place a much more vicious kind of ruin had tainted the vicinity around my windows. The killing of a few books in its crusade, the green and yellow and black mould had taken a foothold in the game of thrones claiming its right to dominate.
Like an observer to the disastrous slo-mo battle that taken place before my eyes, I violently roamed around like a giant aiding the increasing decay of my room. As I returned from Sweden I ended up in the middle of this disastrous scene (this despite leaving it in an “alright” state before leaving) and after a week of desperately trying to disregard the mess, I had to once again claim ownership of my kingdom.
The first hostile tribe to deal with was the mould infestation. Climbing around like a monkey in the windows I, to be honest, really did not expect much of a change, I was more or less convinced that the mould had become such a powerful ruler that I with my little bottle of Chlorine could do nothing to alter the power structure. Spraying half of the bottle’s contents on the mould, the rest dripping on my now grey-with-pink-bleach-spots-shirt, the mould simply washed of – to my great surprise. I am passionately hoping that I have established a new order and not simply rubbed all the mould around resulting in an even worse state of affairs in a couple of weeks.
After washing the windows, a combination of throwing garbage, vacuum clean spots of roughly one square meter at a time, move some stuff, vacuum clean some more and washing my clothes proceeded. While the cleaning was taking hours it was becoming more and more imminent how nice the room actually was…
As the clothes side of my “disciplination” was beginning to clear up, I needed to deal with the books. Once again I decided that the “lacking-some-important-body-parts-bookshelf” I had previously liberated from the basement needed to be put together. Working with a combination of screws, matches, nails and four 90 degree shelf holders the bookshelf actually managed to stay relatively square and did not fall into that parallelogram shape it had last time.
The last finishing touches included moving the bed so that the bookshelf had a proper place, putting up the curtains again and placing out the “carpet” once more.
For the first time in a long time, I kind of want to go home.