Manifestos of tidy sometimes come from unlikely places, and may emerge in the literature of the avant-garde just as easily as they do in Life Strategies by Dr Phil.įew modern movements subscribed to the credo of ‘neat, clean, and tidy’ more earnestly than the Italian Futurists did. But sometimes the advocates of tidy get more motivated, more organised, more sympathetic to pamphleteering and the distribution of manifestos. Mostly the imperative has been handed on as part of an oral tradition – of childhood encouragements, cautionary tales, and admonishments. It is hard for me to be neutral about tidy.īecause tidiness, of course, isn’t just about how things might be or currently are – it’s about how things should be. My year master said my handwriting looked like that of ‘a child pretending to write while still not really knowing the alphabet’. It’s now hard to comprehend how this is even possible. In high school, I almost failed geography on neatness grounds alone. (My own attempts to do this had repeatedly failed, and I reliably ruined books with my incapacity to ever lay flat the adhesive plastic.) But my early-year resolutions were always undone I would revert to my old ways, eroding my resolution one dishevelled act at a time. I was the boy whose pants would tirelessly eject his shirttails, the boy with a bird-nest bouffant, with long, dirty nails at the end of inky blue hands, carrying a time capsule school bag filled with crumbs, crayon particles, and buttered cling wrap.Įvery year I’d buy new highlighters and coloured folders and get my friends to cover all of the new schoolbooks in ConTact. Even after its recent demographic realignment, its martinetish overtones remain, and I am duly haunted.

But this has changed, and the word is now doing good trade among my peers. Rather, it was a term – usually a verb, sometimes a noun or an adjective – used by adults to address children, who were directed to tidy their rooms or desks, or to make themselves look ‘neat and tidy’ for someone or something.

Until recently, my sense was that ‘tidy’ wasn’t a word much used in adult conversation.

Japanese proverb about tidiness