A journalist reflects on the sentimental attachments to the clutter on their desk, from old research papers to airline boarding passes and treasured dictionaries.
In a special summer series, our writers take a look at the story behind something that they hold onto even though they don’t like it at all.Visitors to Canberra’s sterile parliament house sometimes declared their spirits had revived once they’d seen my desk in the press gallery. Books were stacked to teetering heights, print-outs of long-forgotten research papers rose in yellowing heaps, old showbags of budget papers, never opened or read, cluttered the foot well.
Justin McManus Airline boarding passes had a special spot in case I wanted to cheer myself up by recalling years-ago trips to London or Moscow or Nairobi or Tokyo. Reams of expenses receipts from long lunches – some involving actual food – spilled from drawers. Leaking pens, ancient notebooks filled with scrawl that only I could decipher …How could I get rid of this stuff? Any part of it might be needed at any time. Why, if it became necessary to know the whereabouts of every Commonwealth war cemetery in France, Belgium, Gallipoli and South-East Asia I needed only remove 10 books from one of the stacks (having first swept a clearing through collections of disused computer bags and mouse pads, trusting there might be no mouse droppings), and there would be exposed the required text, its pages stained with spilled coffee or something stronger. Lording over it all sat my most treasured possessions: an Oxford English Dictionary and a Roget’s Thesaurus. The Oxford was thick enough to use as a weapon in a furious argument over the correct use of such words as “literally” or “enormity”, both of which have become wickedly corrupted, whatever modernists and lesser dictionaries, especially anything published by Americans, might say.The Roget’s Thesaurus sported more than 700 pages of synonyms and antonyms for just about any word imaginable. The thesaurus’s importance was drastically elevated by the fact that one of my daughters had presented it to me as a gift when she became a press gallery journalist, to
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