Decluttering

 

The contracts aren’t signed yet, but we need to think about moving our stuff from here to Southport. It isn’t going to be cheap, may have to be done in two stages and there’s no point in paying to move things we don’t need.

No point in pretending , either,  that our furniture is ‘shabby chic’ . Old IKEA tat in nearer the mark. My facebook chums tell me what I know in my heart – that flat-pack furniture doesn’t travel. It doesn’t even stay put very well, if I was the original  assembler.  ('Do you have to do that now, Sheila? I'm trying to watch the cricket.')Most of it can go to charities, albeit my sister hints that British Heart Foundation may draw the line at our stuff. Maybe the clearance people will take it when they come to empty the garage. At a price, no doubt.

 In some ways the furniture isn't a problem, once we've decided which items to jettison and which to keep. The removal men or the clearance people will see it them. Books, VHS tapes and papers are more troublesome.

I can’t believe that since we cleared the spare room of our main cache of books there’s so much left. When my son returned from Brussels to a job at Canary Wharf he occupied the spare room and we filled about twenty black sacks. All went into the garage. Very occasionally I look for something in there, usually without success.

Some have accused me of hoarding. To them I say, you try to teach English and Media , write a film book , magazine  articles and stories and learn four  foreign languages, and see if you don’t gather some moss.

Roy pretends that two shelves of bridge books are so slight  as to be almost  invisible and guards  dozens of VHS tapes, not to mention volumes of Dickens,  Betjeman and out-of-date Halliwell Film Guides. 

The other day he agreed to empty a small cupboard above the built-in wardrobe in the bedroom, used for storing electricity cables and the like . There were even a couple of empty boxes that once held the Bose radio and the DVD player. What really got me, though, was the discovery of a dozen or so vinyl record albums - rescued and carefully hidden when he agreed to sell his jazz collection ten years ago!

Interestingly, there's a whole literature about decluttering, available for those who are about to move or clear a house. The accumulation and dispersal of things, it seems,  is not so much a practical as a psychological challenge.  And it's partly to do with when you were born.