What I’d really like is an attic

This week we have been clearing out the loft. It would have been much more exciting if we’d had an attic to clear out instead. Lofts are so dreary – forgotten spaces in the eaves, smelling of old suitcases and mouldering clothes – but attics are so much more glamorous, containing the promise of adventure and foreboding. All those literary attics are so exciting: the one in Jane Eyre is home to a “mad woman”, while Polly’s attic in The Magician’s Nephew (the prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) leads to exciting adventures in unknown lands, where she and her friend Digory witness the creation of Narnia. You don’t get that in a loft. Well, not ours at any rate.

This is what our loft provides instead: old suitcases, children’s toys, ageing ski gear, piles upon piles of hideous curtains, bits of old furniture and mouse droppings. No long-lost works by old masters or forgotten Ming vases there. We do have an old wasp nest lurking in a corner and it is an amazing thing to behold. It would surely win prizes at the Venice Biennale if only insects were allowed to submit their work.

Our loft is not entirely without interest, though. One of the suitcases contains old letters written in the days when long-distance phone calls were shockingly expensive, and before email and WhatsApp had been invented. A battered cardboard box is full of the badges I earned during my time as a Brownie and then a Girl Guide, as well as swimming and ice skating badges reflecting my embarrassingly modest achievements in those areas. Okay, maybe not that riveting.

There are also ancient school reports containing actual grades and teachers’ handwritten comments, unlike my children’s school reports, which were a complete mystery to me: I had absolutely no idea how their grading system worked, which seemed to allocate numbers at random, and the teachers’ remarks were so carefully worded that they had lost all meaning. Sadly, teachers no longer feel free to write comments such as this one about the author Jilly Cooper: “Jilly has set herself an exceedingly low standard, which she has failed to maintain.” Now, we’d have to eavesdrop at staffroom doors to hear what teachers really think of their pupils.

If I’m honest, there is really only one item of any interest to be found in our loft. Nestling among the boxes and bags is something that, if you come across it unexpectedly, is guaranteed to make you scream and jump back in alarm. It is my embalmed wedding dress, preserved for eternity in a box with a transparent lid. I think when we move house that we’ll leave this creepy relic of the 1980s behind, just to inject a little frisson of excitement into that dreary space in the eaves.