Most of us – I certainly am, as was my father – are driven to collect things, but more possessions do not make us happier. It is a human urge that is rapidly degrading the planet: as the forests are felled, the landfill sites grow bigger and bigger and the atmosphere is filled with greenhouse gases. Progress, the novelist Ivan Klima once gloomily observed, is simply more movement and more rubbish. I think of the streets of Kathmandu.
