Spring cleaning. With extreme prejudice

(Taken from this week's Occidental Tourist, first broadcast Saturday 16th May, 2009)

Last week I was complaining about having a cold despite the improvement in the Taipei weather. For that, this week I have been rewarded with tonsillitis. Self-diagnosed, I might add -- I concluded that an inability to swallow without pain coupled with two swollen lumps either side of my windpipe could surely be nothing else. My body has subsequently been so smug about this diagnosis that it is highly reluctant for me to recover quickly. You called this one, it seems to say, bask in the glow of being right! I'd rather be right than healthy, apparently. It's a failing of mine, one which no amount of sickly cough syrup or hot Lemsip can cure.

So aside from the regular radio shifts, I've kept myself mostly cooped up at home this week, nourished by a large batch of chicken and sweetcorn soup that Trish cooked up earlier in the week and of which there still remains several gallons. It occurred to me that this might be a good time for a spot of spring cleaning. Winter has cluttered my room and by extension, my mind. And life in general.

Clutter is pernicious as it instills a sense of apathy and helplessness. An excellent self-defense mechanism, as clutter makes itself the very thing that stops you rousing yourself to get rid of all the clutter. It takes a very vigorous effort then to effect a change. I managed it last year, when I girded my loins and in the words of my former housemate Mary Helen "tore my room a new one." That is to say, I tidied my room. With extreme prejudice.

The despair of clutter is not knowing where to start. To remove clutter from one item of furniture means putting it somewhere else, most often of necessity on another piece of furniture. This then amounts to random clutter displacement. Clutter has been transferred but the balance of clutter remains unaffected. So you get tough, with what my mother always referred to as the "Big Black Bag" approach. As in, "If you don’t tidy your room, I'm going to come with a Big Black Bag and throw everything out." As an adult, I sometimes wonder if life would have been better if she had ever followed through with that threat. I would have kicked up a fuss, sure. But what if I had learned in the process that "stuff" is not important. That actually, losing some stuff might actually de-clutter your life and cause you to refocus on the things that really matter? Would that not have been a superb lesson to learn before the age of ten? One even worth losing your Optimus Prime over?

Well, maybe not Optimus. Starscream, perhaps.

A human life builds clutter whenever it stays in one place for any amount of time. The worst clutter is stuff that "might come in useful." (It won't.) Or things that have a sentimental value even when you know they shouldn’t have. Three years ago, I went to Taipei Flower market one weekend and saw an artist drawing pictures of people. I admired in particular the caricatures he had drawn of various political figures and local celebrities. I asked if he would draw one me one – with myself as the subject. Actually, I didn't know the Chinese word for caricature and still don't. So instead I asked if he would draw me with "exaggerated features." I was proud of knowing the Chinese word for "exaggerated" and believed I had got my meaning across. "So I should draw you with a big nose?" he said. "Yes," I said, "a big nose. Exaggerated features." And he went and drew me with a big nose. Normal in every other regard but with a big nose.

I still have that picture. Why? I didn’t want to hang it up, didn’t even really want to ever look at it again. But I didn’t want to throw it out, having paid money for it. So it's still there, in a plastic tub under my bed, rolled up. Along with the biography of an Indian yogi left to me by Mary Helen. "I think you'd enjoy this as you're a spiritual person," she said, mistaking me for a spiritual person. That's still there as I know she'll ask me one day about it and I am at least spiritual enough to know that lying is bad, especially if you're as bad a liar as I am.

But I digress. And that's the problem with my cleaning generally. I digress. I find an item that interests me and my purpose – feeble enough to begin with – evaporates completely. There are any number of things that can cause me to lay down my duster – actually not a duster, as I tend to use an abandoned pair of boxer shorts disinfected with lemon pledge, it works just as well.

Cleaning is best done in a trance I feel, an altered state where you don’t realize how bored you are. The British sport of cricket puts me in such a state, just one of the reasons I love it. And it's no coincidence that last year's bout of spring-cleaning frenzy coincided with online BBC broadcasts of England's test series against New Zealand. For six hours a day, from around 8am to mid-afternoon, the perfect backdrop to let the Big Black Bag do its work.

Speaking of cricket, I like to see myself as a cricket evangelist of sorts. My methods are much the same as the religious kind. If I know someone to be an admirer of baseball, I will start my discussing the similarities between the two sports – the fact of hitting a ball with a stick and running, for example. Then we might progress to the mutual appreciation of statistics enshrined in both games. Eventually I stand convicted that the individual will ultimately conclude cricket to be much the subtler and more varied of the two sports and be converted. It hasn't happened yet. But I've been sowing seeds, like the parable says.

Last week I had a great chance to actually play a game of cricket with some of my housemates and other friends. A chance to bring the game of cricket to the heathens of the US and Canada. We took my little cricket set to the local park and tried to find a suitable space. You need a nice flat area where the ball can bounce without massive deviation and a reasonable amount of space to hit the ball into. We found such an area and set about putting the stumps in the ground.

Almost immediately we were attracting some attention for this outlandish spectacle – that looked like baseball but was not. "What is going on here!" demanded one middle-aged gent. We thought we might be in trouble but we weren't – he was just, you know, asking. Later on a silver-haired old gentleman approached us with a very dignified humility. "Excuse me," he said, "may I know the name of this game?" I explained it, gave it its Chinese name as well, which translates as something like "flat board ball" and told him the countries in which it was popular: Australia, India, South Africa… "Ah! The territories of the British Empire!" he pronounced, very quickly divining the colonial origins of the sport. They can be sharp, the older people here, make no mistake.

He then asked us if we were religious. You see? A cricket evangelist, like I said. The game has that effect on people...