Black jackets from Yohji Yamamoto, certainly. And I could probably always find room for another pair of Margiela tabi shoes. But looking back, the things I have accumulated most are less tangible: ideas, experiences, encounters and an enduring curiosity about why some organisations thrive while others falter.
We are all collectors of something. Books, shoes, music, pens, plants, stamps, gadgets, places we have visited, even steps in an exercise routine. But what else do we accumulate over a lifetime?
For me, it has been knowledge, experience and different ways of looking at the world.
At certain points in my life I have stopped and asked myself: what exactly are you doing? How did you end up here? What has motivated you? Why did something seem interesting enough to pursue in the first place?
Certain values have remained central to me throughout: equality, creativity, diversity and responding to climate change. But alongside them has always been curiosity.
Why does one organisation thrive while another falters? Why does one team or sportsperson keep winning while another struggles to sustain momentum? What do people or institutions keep doing consistently, even while everything around them changes? How do they reinvent themselves without losing sight of what matters?
Those questions have interested me throughout my career.
Looking back, it is tempting to draw neat threads between our experiences and make them appear more planned than they really were. We all tell stories about ourselves. Memories shift. Timelines become confused or conflated. What looked like a deliberate strategy in retrospect may, at the time, simply have been a decision to explore something that seemed interesting.
I have often been asked why I have undertaken a number of trustee roles. It was never about accumulating positions. In fact, I have usually had to choose one opportunity over another.
What interested me was the chance to encounter different ideas and different ways of doing things.
I have always liked visiting people and asking why they have approached a problem in the way they have, why they chose a particular role, or why they pursued one piece of research rather than another. I still do it now, although increasingly the conversations take place on Teams or Zoom rather than in somebody’s office.
It is not only about finding an answer.
It is about testing your own thoughts against someone else’s.
That, for me, is the more interesting kind of accumulation. Not the accumulation of stuff, or titles, or roles, but the experiences you draw into yourself. The questions. The conversations. The things that make you think: what if? Why this decision and not another?
When I began working in creative higher education, I became increasingly interested in how courses and disciplines could learn from one another, not only within an institution but nationally and internationally.
Over time, that curiosity stretched further into cultural, charitable and civic organisations.
That seemed important. After all, students and graduates do not exist only within universities. They move into a much wider social, cultural, political and economic world.
How can we understand what we are doing if we are not in touch with what others are doing?
If we are serious about widening participation, equality or creating institutions in which people from different backgrounds and experiences can flourish, then we need to understand the barriers people encounter beyond our own organisations.
If we are serious about climate change and the adjustments required to reach Net Zero, we need to look beyond our own sector and see how others are responding.
And if we believe in creativity, we need to continue experiencing its power ourselves, in museums, theatres, galleries, literature and places we might not ordinarily think to explore.
Whatever our motivations or beliefs, they need testing.
Curiosity should sometimes take us towards people, places and ideas we would not automatically choose.
That feels particularly important now.
Social media has made it remarkably easy to live inside echo chambers. Increasingly, AI can also give us answers that appear fluent, confident and familiar. The risk is that we become surrounded by ideas that confirm what we already think.
Curiosity should do the opposite.
It should unsettle us a little. It should introduce us to other viewpoints and force us to ask whether our assumptions still hold.
Perhaps that is why I have spent so much of my life visiting other organisations, joining boards, asking questions and trying to understand how somebody else has approached a problem.
People sometimes describe that as public service or duty.
For me, it has always been curiosity.
And perhaps that is what I have really been accumulating all along: not positions or possessions, but different ways of seeing.
The more experiences I have accumulated, the more aware I have become of how much there still is to understand.