From time to time I look at all the things in my room and wish I could escape to a monastery: a nice, minimalist monastery, with plain wooden floors, clean white walls and not much else. Then I remember that I am IN a monastery, and the thick clutter of things which so irritates me is there because it is necessary. It is what enables me to do my work. However much I long for the Cistercian emptiness of the imagination, I am stuck with the Benedictine messiness of actual life. The stacks of paper, the machines, the boxes and files in which I regularly lose important items and which crowd round my bed like a pack of wolves menacing an intruder, are not going to go away. They are part of what constitutes monastic life in the twenty-first century.

Isn’t it strange how we always seem to want what we cannot have? My desire to have less is only a variation on the desire to have more. At the root of both is a self-centred dissatisfaction with life as it is, which is probably much more reprehensible than I am prepared to admit. The one thing I can say in my favour is, wanting to get rid of things rather than acquire them does make for some interesting trips to the local dump.