There must be a moral in here somewhere
I can’t speak but I can guffaw!
At first read, this Telegraph story induces guffaws:
A man whose home was so full of rubbish that he had to build an intricate network of tunnels to get around may have died after losing his way in the labyrinth.
Then it rapidly becomes sobering.
Investigators believe Gordon Stewart, 74, died as a result of dehydration, after becoming unable to find his way out of the mass of carrier bags, boxes, old furniture and other junk.
Bad enough that the man died, trapped in a maze of his own making.
I built it – I can find my way out – can’t I?
It gets worse:
Police had to call in a specialist diving team because the smell from the house, Broughton, Buckinghamshire, was so overpowering.
Of all the impositions our neighbors may make upon us, noise is second most obnoxious, smell most noxious, because it is the one sense human beings cannot block, and the most emotive, going straight to the brain (via the limbic system) without being filtered.
Neighbors had become concerned that they had not seen Mr Stewart for several days and raised the alarm.
We use our sense of smell mainly to warn us of danger – predators, foul food, carrion, disease. Yet we can become inured to our own smell (ask anyone who’s ever visited habitual smokers), and to that of our environment:
According to witnesses, the officers were faced with mounds of foul-smelling garbage which he had used to construct tunnels around his home.
As the photo shows, Mr. Stewart lived in a semi-detached home:
Police discovered a confusing system of tunnels networking around the interior of the building.
He must have been its owner, because no landlord would have tolerated his habits:
The smell was so overpowering police had to call in a specialist team – equipped with breathing apparatus – to search the two-storey house. They discovered a confusing system of tunnels networking around the interior of the building, with Mr Stewart lying dead inside.
As I’ve previously posted, among homeownership’s bundle of benefits are the two most basic ones, that Mr. Stewart valued and used:
Security of tenure
Improvability
Or in Mr. Stewart’s case, adaptive reuse:
Locals say Mr Stewart, who wore a pony-tail, was often spotted riding his bike around the streets.
Wears a pony tail? Rides a bike? Definitely eccentric.
One neighbour, who asked not to be named, said: “He was slightly eccentric, but very clever.”
Eccentric man, to the rescue!
‘Clever’ in this case being the polite English word for ‘dotty.’
“He was just a collector. He came home with a load of cardboard boxes and lived in his own world.”
As homeowners, we have the right to furnish our nest how we choose.
If you build it, weaver bird babes will come
Or to leave it untended:
A car dating back to the 1950s stands in the garage believed to have been left untouched for years.
Yet a home’s exterior is always the face its owner chooses to show the world, and Mr. Stewart’s signals trouble within. Look at that front window:
Blown up and cropped
Bundles in plastic are pressed against the glass, implying volume behind them.
Neighbours said Mr Stewart’s home had been accumulating rubbish for at least 10 years.
Undoubtedly the neighbors knew. Yet Mr. Stewart’s right to privacy – an essential right of urban dwellers – is so powerful both legally and socially that he was left alone to build, inhabit, and become trapped in the visible expression of his own obsession. In fact, continuously building or modifying one’s living area seems a hallmark of a benign obsessive behavior. Consider Simon Rodia of Los Angeles, who spent a third of a century (1921 to 1954) endlessly improving and expanding his environment:
The entrance to Rodia’s compound
Rodia called his life’s work Nuestro Pueblo meaning ‘our town,’ and it’s presented as a welcoming self-built vernacular community:
Made of found objects from beer bottles to broken ceramics
Characteristic of obsession is its unending quest for satisfaction, likewise demonstrated by Sarah Winchester’s Mystery House in San Jose, which as a widow she built and built and kept expanding for thirty-eight years, her quest ending, like Rodia’s and Mr. Stewart’s, only in death:
The ’stairs to nowhere’ in the Winchester House
In the same spirit that’s had us tour
We are what we live in. Houses express our selves, and when our self is incomplete, insular, and insecure, we keep building and modifying and tunneling:
A spokesman from Thames Valley Police, said: “Police were called on Friday at 12.26pm by a member of public who was concerned for welfare of a resident on
Other than a dead body trapped in a maze of rubbish, that is.
It is believed Mr Stewart lived alone and has no next of kin.
Undoubtedly; he was unvisited for a decade.
Why are we so frightened of the haunted house?
All mod cons, low down payment
Caught within its hidden-door embrace, we are trapped in another person’s universe, one that lacks reference to the sane world outside, and when our captor is insane, so too is our environment.
Sane or insane? Sam Rodia of
As Hamlet put it:
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count
myself a king of infinite space,
Except for one little problem:
were it not that I have bad dreams.
There is a moral: when a home looks wrong on the outside, something is probably wrong on the inside.
Which is the inner world, and which the outer?
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