There is a picture pinned beside my desk, a grid showing nine photographs of the same room. In the first photo there is a single bed, a clock, a lamp, two posters. It looks like maybe a student halls of residence – there is the feeling of homesickness and lack.
In the second picture some rubbish sits on the carpet, the kind of stuff you’d tip out of a rucksack when repacking in a hurry. One poster is wonky. In the third, a chair has joined the room, and a pile of papers, and discarded clothes. In the fifth, a television is just visible beside a second chair, I think I see some speakers, a bundle of sheets. In the ninth and final photo, the bed is hidden beneath a mountain of clothes that touches the ceiling, a broken blind, a large bottle of something red and presumably fizzy. This is the Clutter Image Rating scale, a diagnostic tool designed to measure hoarding habits, and it has somehow become very important to me in the time since I printed it out at work and carefully carried it home inside a book, both as an image and as an evergreen template for the domestic horror stories of our lives.
