ABSTRACT
If collecting can be said to be innate (if often donnant) in the human condition, one of its root manifestations is perhaps the concept of tidiness. Few of us who are responsible for the upkeep of our own domestic environment would contemplate living in it without some sense or order. Within this general requirement for environmental hannony resides the rudiments of a collecting instinct. Jars half full of periodically-counted loose change, destined to be changed back into bank notes when full, or the attractive glass, cork-lidded pasta jars, that have a decorative and aesthetic appeal in a kitchen that the spaghetti's celluloid packaging does not, are symptomatic of this. Those over a certain age will have been 'primed' in these instincts through saving Green Shield, Pink or Co-op stamps towards various catalogue gifts or dividends (see Debenham, 1989). A whole genre of contemporary television programmes on interior decorating have sprung up in recent years (for example Changing Rooms and Dur House) which have the simultaneous effect of making us dissatisfied with the horne, whilst reassuring us that this is nonnal and fun. Often, when these programmes look at small bedrooms and bedsits, the emphasis is on space-saving. Neat, stiff card or plastic containers are employed in which to store (and importantly, hide) shoes, jumpers and assorted intrusive oddments that serve to convey mess and disorder in small spaces. As such, at least on a subconscious level, we train ourselves to adopt the practice or 'habit' ofpositioning material in certain places, in which they are better kept than others. Such traits (Martin, 1995) become more prominent and developed in collecting, and even more so in museums, when storage conditions, materials and temperatures become all important to the collection's preservation. As Lucinda says in the article: 'I just love storing things'. When the article's author, Wolff, asks the assembled women at the Tupperware party why anyone would want to decant food from its packaging into a plastic container, there is silence. Whether this is due to incongruity at such a ridiculous question, or to a question which it had never occurred to them to ask themselves, is a matter of conjecture.
