Your Letters: November 18
SORTING OUT MY ASSEMBLED CLUTTER AT HOME
We all live in little boxes, some bigger than others, all filled with collected stuff, and some have more stuff than others, stuff accumulates with time and fortune, and as the years roll by, stuff that was bought falls into disrepair or out of use, stuff given and never used, and stuff bought when out and about as souvenirs and stuffed into cupboards and never seen again.
Charity shops accumulate good useful stuff that others don't want, so people can buy very cheap stuff to take back to their little boxes and use, and so the cycle of stuff continues in ever widening circles.
With the boss out with one of our daughters for some serious retail therapy, it fell to me to trawl through 46 years of accumulated stuff that has been squirrelled away in cupboards and drawers, and forgotten.
Where do you start? Drawers full of old letters, brochures for stuff that is as old as the hills, boxes of tat and cheap household implements, bought and never used, reams of paper work from banks and building societies, and clothes. Yards of cotton and woollen clothes, in every colour and pattern made by man, all now out of fashion, and all far to small, even found some of the kids baby clothes, and our youngest is 36.
So here's the conundrum, what to bin, give to the charity shop, and what to keep? giving that herself and I are well into extreme upper middle age, or as one of our offspring commented "Pops you're getting far to old and doddery for climbing about on ladders" for me it would all be binned, however if I threw out the baby clothes, I can guarantee that my life would hang by a thread, and I have to sleep at some point, probably in the shed, and she knows where the knife draw is.
My main worry is that when we both become worm bait, the kids will have the awesome task of sorting through a massive collection of memories, her huge china collection, my books, and all the stuff I collected when out and about working all over Albion, and abroad. The lads get all my tools... what?... Well would you really want your old lady waving about a jigsaw, or disk cutter, and what lady do you know that could handle a big industrial Hilti drill, electric jack hammer, or for that matter a chain saw. It has to be the lads.
