It's hereditary, I can't abide waste. When my father died he left enough hoarded rubber bands and paper clips to last another lifetime: the rubber bands have perished, but I'm still using the paper clips, stored in one of his typewriter ribbon tins.
It took me a while to start worrying about this one. For weeks after the man left I was so sad I didn't worry about the empty space. It was cruel when he asked for advice on how to end it all: I just wanted to say don't change a thing, stay, stay forever.
But Ansuman Biswas, the Hermit, has left the building, and there's a space in the tower of the Manchester Museum that needs filling.
While there he selected 40 objects from the collection and invited people to comment on their worth. But I very much wanted to break the rules and send him the whole world, in the hope the bloggers would vote to destroy it.
Not our world, obviously, even in post-Ansuman gloom I can see we probably need to hang on to that for a little while at least, but the thing that hulks over the earth galleries escalator at the Natural History Museum - no fun at all since it stopped turning and dropping continents on the heads of visitors. Too late now.
But there's that empty space in the tower at Manchester. And contemplate how many more potential hermitages there must be.
The new Zaha Hadid museum of transport in Glasgow, the new museum in Liverpool - "the largest newly-built national museum in the UK in over 100 years" as the website puts it, as if that in itself demonstrates unquestionable virtue - and all those other museum spaces I can never quite get my head around. Hermitages.
Who to put into them? Speaker Alan Duncan to live on rations for 40 days? Gordon Brown with a bundle of Georgette Heyer's and a box of Krispy Kremes so he could learn to lighten up a bit? Roy Clare with time to contemplate the Renaissance review a little more closely?
And the wonderful thing about the formula established by Ansuman, is that if after 40 days nobody votes for them to get out, they stay there... forever.
It took me a while to start worrying about this one. For weeks after the man left I was so sad I didn't worry about the empty space. It was cruel when he asked for advice on how to end it all: I just wanted to say don't change a thing, stay, stay forever.
But Ansuman Biswas, the Hermit, has left the building, and there's a space in the tower of the Manchester Museum that needs filling.
While there he selected 40 objects from the collection and invited people to comment on their worth. But I very much wanted to break the rules and send him the whole world, in the hope the bloggers would vote to destroy it.
Not our world, obviously, even in post-Ansuman gloom I can see we probably need to hang on to that for a little while at least, but the thing that hulks over the earth galleries escalator at the Natural History Museum - no fun at all since it stopped turning and dropping continents on the heads of visitors. Too late now.
But there's that empty space in the tower at Manchester. And contemplate how many more potential hermitages there must be.
The new Zaha Hadid museum of transport in Glasgow, the new museum in Liverpool - "the largest newly-built national museum in the UK in over 100 years" as the website puts it, as if that in itself demonstrates unquestionable virtue - and all those other museum spaces I can never quite get my head around. Hermitages.
Who to put into them? Speaker Alan Duncan to live on rations for 40 days? Gordon Brown with a bundle of Georgette Heyer's and a box of Krispy Kremes so he could learn to lighten up a bit? Roy Clare with time to contemplate the Renaissance review a little more closely?
And the wonderful thing about the formula established by Ansuman, is that if after 40 days nobody votes for them to get out, they stay there... forever.
