Kit Harington, Jools Holland, Kirstie Allsopp and Mick Hucknall

From Rev’d Richard Coles, cleric and broadcaster:

Good morning. My name is Richard. And I am an addict.

I think it was as a tiny child at Kindergarten in Kettering that I first experienced the irresistible allure of stationery. Our progress there was marked on a chart by stick-on coloured stars, which Mrs Buckby kept in in her desk. I can remember to this day opening the drawer, seeing them in their little cellophane packet, pinching them, and sticking them, when no-one was looking, after my own name, so that soon my progress seemed to suggest a future Mozart, Einstein, Kirsty Allsopp.

It was not to be. But a life long love of stationery was born and in this National Stationery Week I stand here to praise treasury tags, panel pins, bulldog clips, thimblettes, and what we (boringly) call paper clips, but the French, (poetically) call ‘trombones’. 

You see, I can’t walk past a stationer’s; and I can’t leave a stationer’s without buying something, anything from a stick of doubtful adhesive to – my new passion – an automatic pencil with a rubber on the end.

What’s that all about? If I look back at my Kindergarten self, perhaps the answer is there: we all like to feel we are master of our destinies, whether at school, at work, or on the world’s stage. And we like to feel equipped to achieve them: Jools, flexing his fingers at the keyboard of his beloved Bosendofer; your fingers, Chris, flying over the faders of this mixing desk; Jon Snow’s testing the rippling Valyrian steel of his sword, Longclaw, at the battle of Castle Black:

Mine, however, is a Game not of Thrones, but of Trombones; of paper clips, stickies, and my Dymo label printer… and thus armed I will wrestle the chaos of the world into immaculately filed order.

An illusion of course: we are no more masters of our destinies than of the random fluctuations of the M25; and sooner or later the faders will fade, the boogie woogie resolve, London house prices stall (well, maybe not that one), the years hold back no longer, the dragons breathe their smoky last – and then, only then, we discover the destiny we’re actually made for.