Rubbish

September 14, 2003 12:52 p.m.

Rubbish !

As a boy Nicholas collected sweet wrappers and tickets, envelopes and stamps, crisp packets and bottle tops. He kept wrapping paper from gifts, birthday and Christmas cards too. Every Sunday he�d shut himself in his bedroom, pull out boxes, and scissors and glue. He�d organise his collection into scrapbooks and folders, label large brown envelopes and bags. He wrote notes beneath each item: a date of purchase, what he�d eaten that day and the state of the weather. If he had had a bath he said so, indicating which soap he had used.

In his teens Nicky checked off his collection against the receipt from the weekly shop; it upset him if from a multi-pack of flavoured crisps he didn�t have one of each colour. His Mum bought one of those platform beds to make more space for his collection, he persuaded her to give up the guest bedroom where he put flat-pack shelves and he obliged her to leave the car on the drive so that the garage could be a permanent workshop for his obsession. She didn�t mind; her family had a history of manic depression and autism, in any case, her son had a photographic memory, information stuck to it, his academic record was impeccable even if he had few friends.

When other boys discovered girls, Nick discovered barcodes and computers. He cross-referenced each item in his collection with a barcode that opened up an entry on the product: when purchased, branding and discounts, trade press comments and his own opinion on the product�s quality and worth. He kept a diary that he pasted into a relational database; it quantified and qualified his life in weights and measures; he was 6ft tall now and weighed 11 and a half stone.

Nick listened to his career advisor about what to do and where to go after school; he had a job packing shelves at his local supermarket; that 's all he wanted to do. He turned down the scholarship he was offered to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics at St.John�s College, Oxford.

Nick spent two years packing shelves; he cherished night work. He only left the shop floor as a result of going on a placement as a junior buyer where he discovered a glitch in the chains purchasing and logistics software. He went on to develop retail distribution software for all UK operations; it is the generic tool through-out the retail trade today.

Then, in his twenties, when visiting a supermarket on the edge of a small Cotswold town, Nicholas tipped. He felt unease in the centre of the old town seeing a boarded up grocery store, a butcher's with a 'for sale' sign in the window and a newsagent's that sold knick-knacks not news. Getting out of his car in the supermarket car park Nick saw a sweet wrapper caught in a hawthorn hedge; he retrieved it. It came from a King Sized Mars Bar, price 45p; he had an earlier wrapper he recalled, when a Mars Bar cost 3p. While the store manager waited at the entrance to the store Nick scoured the car park for litter. The store manager sent the 'clean store hygiene operative' out with a bag. Nick presented the bag and its contents to the store manager.

'Check the barcode on every item. Every item that is ours catalogue it.'

'That could take days.'

Nicholas couldn't concentrate on his work at the store that day loading and testing upgraded software. Instead he spent the rest of the day searching neighbouring fields, collecting rubbish from hedges on roads out of town, knocking on doors to ask if he could retrieve a piece of paper he had seen in a tree. He bought a town map and annotated it, marking each spot where he found a piece of litter. He took a bar-code reader and a PDA with him. It took him three days. Nicholas never went back to his job. He got a job as a librarian in the Bodleian Library, Oxford where he collates items in the collection of ephemera to which he donated some 250,000 items. Once a month he chooses a bin in Central Oxford, empties its contents into a bag and collates it.

By Henry