In another midwinter week of miserable news, at last a couple of rays of sunshine. Yes, the UK might be the only G7 country heading into recession this year (a worse performing economy than even sanction-hit Russia).

Yes, half the country might be out of strike. And yes, our creaking government is careering from one crisis to the next (tax avoidance last week, bullying this). But for those of having done Dry January, February is finally here. Cheers!

The good news continues with the revelation that Marie Kondo, the queen of clean, has ‘kind of given up’ when it comes to tidying up.

Kondo made her name through the concept of decluttering – tidying your house, binning most of your stuff and ‘sparking joy’ from the spotlessness and space that was left.

Kondo has recently had her third child, which seems to be the moment she has given in to slobbing out like the rest of us.

‘My home is messy,’ she revealed in a newspaper interview, ‘but the way I am spending my time is the right way for me at this stage of my life.’

Welcome then, Marie, to the myriad wonders of the world of clutter.

I must confess to not being one of life’s tidy types. If you look closely at my office, you might just discern a shape of a desk underneath teetering piles of books and papers.

Thanks to Marie Kondo’s TV shows and books I’ve long been castigated for my mess, not least her claim in one programme that a home should contain no more than around thirty books (don’t get me started on that).

For all Marie Kondo’s philosophising, mess is actually important in all sorts of ways.

‘If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind,’ Einstein once said of his own groaning workspace, ‘what are we to think of an empty desk?’

In fact, there’s plenty of research that shows messy environments tend to lead to greater creativity; studies also show tidy offices don’t lead to any benefit: ‘pilers’ are in fact just as productive than ‘filers’.

Mess is better in all sorts of situations. Child psychologists suggest messy play is good for young children’s development. Larking about in mud and dirt helps build immunities in a way sanitised set ups don’t.

The nation’s road verges are better left alone to let wildlife flourish rather being mown to a pancake.

And give me the medieval warrens of a Salisbury or a Winchester over the grid roads of Milton Keynes any day of the week.

Life, by nature, is messy, as Marie Kondo is finally beginning to understand.

That’s not something to tidy away, but to be acknowledged and embraced.