>A room of one’s own

>

If opinions on any of these subjects had been chalked on the pavement, nobody would have stooped to read them. The nonchalance of the hurrying feet would have rubbed them out in half an hour.

Virginia Woolf

Let’s say you receive a tip off, someone, like the national intelligence agency, or even your pesky aunty Poppy, had successfully applied to the courts for a warrant, authorising them to search your hovel/room/home. What would you hide?

After divesting of the forgotten perlemoen and its less legal narcotic cousins there are the little inanities that make up our lives, the seemingly insignificant things we pack our lives into that we’d protect from the prying eyes of the world, simply because they are our own. Some people guard their phones with the fierceness of a weaver bird tearing down a rejected nest, perhaps because they have something to hide but perhaps too, they have more to protect. There’s something so humiliating, dehumanising in fact, in coercing another to bare all.

I’d hide:

My journals: As evidence to past misdeeds they are about as good as a perlemoen stash and I’d also like to preserve some semblance of the well-formed opinion the world has of me.

There’s that gift, its ambiguity confused me so I keep it in its original gift packaging on one of my book shelves. I’ve only ever peeked at it once and I wouldn’t want to explain how it got there.

I’ll tell you what I’d hide, I’d tell you where I hid it, but I wouldn’t let you get to it because there’s too much in there that’s just mine.

What would you hide? Or are you an open-book, unperturbed about the world roaming about? You know they say a lot of open minds should be closed for repairs, so I’d venture, a few open books need a trip to the bindery. What would you hide?