I used to think that only wire coat hangers bred. Their skeletal presence hung in every clothes cupboard I opened, worst of all in the backroom where they multiplied unashamedly. I was wrong.
Smaller metal also breeds – filling the gap left by public enemy number one, plastic. To maintain this ascendancy it uses two human traits to further the takeover: the disregard of small things and the clinging to clutter. Paper clips, safety pins, staples and bits you don’t even know about are on the increase. Because human beings don’t think twice about buying what they already have if the purchase is small and inexpensive, these sorts of metal are finding their way into homes where their companions number in the hundreds. And even if the buyer sees how many are already sitting in the drawer, lying in a jar or at the bottom of a stationery bag, he will not throw a single one away. The hand hovering over the waste paper basket is arrested by the principle of not throwing away anything that could prove useful. We’ll dump or recycle paper because it can’t be used again, but paper clips…ah, you never know when they might come in handy. “Imagine if I hadn’t had a safety pin handy when Trump was elected.”*
The mind of metal knows that when things are small enough to lie unnoticed they are also not targets for disposal. Humans frequently vow to get rid of their clutter and, if they do (a big if), it is the large items which find their way out the house to the dump or secondhand sale. The odds and ends of metal living in pockets, bags, drawers and cupboards are overlooked, all the while multiplying in number.
America manufactures ten billion paper clips a year. Be assured, the number coming out of China will probably match that. These production figures obliterate the idea of our moving into paperless society. With the knowledge and business that computers have unlocked and generated, records of the information, transactions and deals need to have hard copies. This requires paper clips or staples (another breeder of note) as there’s never any document worth having these days which does not number more than a single page. You can be sure that small metal is always happy to find a host.
Historically, the first well-known brand of paper clip was called the Gem. The manufacturers probably saw its value solely in terms of securing the paper sheets but that clever thing knew that, as malleable and strong as it is, hundreds of other uses would be found for it. Though being straightened into a thin metal skewer compromises its capacity to breed, it is more than glad to sacrifice its life for the cause. Who’s going to throw away something which you might use to unblock the glue tube, pick the hand-cuffs or unblock the saltshaker? And if you’re thinking that these fancily coloured paper clips are plastic and metal’s on the way out, nicking that plastic will show you otherwise.
When they come to clear out my last abode, they’ll most likely find the wire hangers I refused to skewer my shirts to, the orphan staples which came away from their mother rail, the paper clips at the back of the drawer and the safety pins I couldn’t close. That’s, of course, if small metal hasn’t taken the world over by then – the last nail in the coffin.
*People in Britain began wearing safety pins in protest against the Brexit vote. This was taken up by Americans in protest against Donald Trump’s election. www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/election-safety-pin-protest –
