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3 October 2013

The fight against entropy

It all begins with a hard line against Eucryl Tooth Powder.

By Nicholas Lezard

I suppose it all started when I learned about the Second Law of Thermodynamics at school. There you are, bumbling along in your safe little world, blandly assured that things will go on getting better, that everything will become more prosperous and ordered, and then – wham! – you see that simple little equation, Δ > 0, absorb the implications of the fact that heat cannot pass from a colder to a warmer body, and not only do you understand that eventually the universe will die in a uniform chill of something not much cosier than absolute zero, or something roughly around -700°C, but you also understand how hard it is to keep your room tidy.
 
Since then, I have fought only the most desperate rearguard actions against entropy. “You can’t fart against thunder,” as my Great-Uncle Cecil used to say, when faced with a superior hand at poker – and things don’t come much more thunderous than the heat-death of the universe.
 
Women, though, in my experience, do not see it this way. And in case you think that’s sexist, I should add that most men don’t see it my way, either. Men, though, are more slobby; there are women who are messier than me but they are so spectacularly messy that they get featured on television. The key words here are “in my experience”, and last week, after a few months of Putting Up With Things, the Beloved decided to take a rare day off work, roll her sleeves up and get cracking against the entropy. So that I can help her with this, instead of just lying in bed deeply sensing the futility of all human endeavour to a slightly more intense pitch than I did yesterday, she invents a game called “Keep or Chuck?”, complete with theme tune. The game – and it really is quite clever of her to realise that to get me to help, a game must be made of it; no one else has worked that out before – is played to a strict time limit of ten minutes at a stretch, and the object is to make as many decisions about what to keep or chuck within that time. No overt reward is given for chucking as opposed to keeping something but a little something in the games master’s demeanour suggests that chucking manky redundant things will be rewarded later and keeping manky redundant things will not be so much.
 
So: title music, please. And, bearing in mind I have been living in the Hovel for only six years . . . bathroom cabinet first. Nyrelex for Chesty Coughs (expiry date, 1998): chuck. Night Nurse (now virtually crystallised, best before 1997): chuck. Peppermint foot lotion “of the most extraordinary consistency”: chuck. Brush-on facial hair remover: chuck. Haemorrhoid cream (b b 2004): chuck. Clarins Honey-Tinted Moisturiser (no best before date, but only the letters “ARIN” of “Clarins” remain visible): chuck. Rinstead sugar-free pastilles (b b 2005): chuck. “Soothing and cooling” moist haemorrhoid tissues (b b 2004): chuck. (I begin to sense a pattern here and feel a pang of pity for whoever lived here before me.) Eucryl Tooth Powder – or, as the Beloved calls it, “Eucryl Tooth Powder???? What the fuck’s that???” – keep: I bought it myself. I then have to explain it. Explaining Eucryl Tooth Powder to pretty much anyone under 50 is harder than you might think. Mitchum roll-on deodorant (“so strong you can even skip a day”): keep – the name and slogan are hilarious. No, on second thoughts, chuck. It pre-dates me. (Later inspection shows that it has actually been kept.) Ibis Mosquito Re-Impregnation Kit (no date): keep. Unless climate change gallops along even faster than in the most pessimistic scientist’s nightmares, I won’t be needing this in the Hovel, but how cool is a re-impregnation kit? Even cooler than an impregnation kit, surely.
 
And so on. In the ten minutes allotted to “Keep or Chuck?”, the Beloved has managed to show me an enormous array of redundant products which, despite having been kept in a cabinet for years, have not so much accrued a layer of dust as actually grown beards; and I wonder, not for the first time, what kink it is in my psyche that prevents me, or people like me, from performing this perfectly simple and reasonable act. It is possible that the childhood loss of a loved family member made me reluctant to throw things away, that it’s a reaction against rejection, death being the greatest rejection of all; but then again I know people with similar events in their backgrounds and they’re not untidy at all. Search me. Or not. You don’t know what you’ll find.
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