Rediscovering the past at home
I’m currently staying for the weekend at my father’s place on the south coast of England where over the past six months there have been a few changes, not least the departure of a long-serving part-time housekeeper and her replacement by another who is several notches more dynamic and diligent.
At an early stage of her tenure the latter proposed that she do a general spring-clean of the property (accepted) which of itself was bound to be ‘interesting’ given that over the past forty years the house has both been accumulating vast amounts of clutter year-by-year and yet to all intents and purposes been paid little or no attention in terms of re-decorating, maintenance and updating.
Thus over the past few months we have had the strange but welcome experience of ‘re-claiming’ one room after another – with the clutter therein being divided into piles identified as (respectively) (1) ‘out-and-out undeniably rubbish’; (2) ‘rubbish by any independent, common sense, yardstick but just possibly of some interest to someone in the family’; and (3) items which are clearly of potential sentimental or monetary value.
Most recently therefore – during my weekly visits – I have had a series of opportunities to review items of potential interest to me and my family.
By inclination my instincts regarding such things tend to be either ‘full on’ or else pretty passive.
On the one hand I’m not a great one for tidiness, order or indeed throwing stuff out.
And yet, on the other – just occasionally, when the mood takes me – I can go to the other extreme.
Instead of applying the criteria “Keep everything unless you’re absolutely sure you’ll never need it again”, I start from the position that everything is obsolete and/or of no possible future interest/importance unless, that is, it metaphorically slaps me in the face with a kipper in order to register that my very existence would be challenged if I didn’t keep it in an identifiable and safe place.
By this route, with a growing momentum and sense of carefree abandon, I can get over-enthusiastic and begin chucking out 85% – rather than a perhaps more sensible 50% – of everything in my path.
That said, I must admit that I’ve made some pretty extraordinary ‘rediscoveries’ of things from my past over the period.
Only last week, in the room above the garage, I came across two now-pretty-sorry-for-themselves cardboard packing cases – one filled with crockery and kitchenware, the other with books – that has been deposited there when, after my wife died, I sold my five-bedroomed house in a Wimbledon suburb and downsized to a three-bedroomed flat with my kids.
The case containing books was a remarkable find, not least because they – or at least the newer ones – were in remarkably pristine condition after spending twenty-six years in a dank, unheated loft.
It may not surprise Rusters that as I carried out the task I sensed that my accompanying feelings – embracing both exhilaration and yet unworldly puzzlement – were probably similar to those that engulfed Howard Carter as he first opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922.
In the event it didn’t take me long to decide that the contents of both boxes were Grade A rubbish that could go straight into the skip we have hired to house items earmarked for the local recycling plant – well, all bar two books on specific aspects of the Edwardian era that (as far as I could recall in 2019) I had never set eyes on before but in fact I must have purchased at some point between 1980 and 1993.
I am now looking forward to the prospect of reading them again – or, to all intents and purposes as far as your author is concerned, given his current degree of memory-loss – for the first time.
As someone once said at some point “As one door closes, another opens …”
