Moving house forces you to cast a critical eye over all the stuff you have accumulated throughout your life. How much of it do you need or want? Looking back over our various pandemic lockdowns (which, oddly, seem so long ago now), I seem to have divided my time between walking, doing jigsaw puzzles and endlessly sorting out cupboards, drawers and shelves, as well as the loft, the garage, the garden and entire rooms. Despite all this effort, every day I discover random items and wonder why we still have them.
We are moving twice: once to a temporary rental house and once to the house we will eventually buy. If one move isn’t enough to concentrate your mind, then two will definitely do it. Why do we still have a wallpapering table? I swore never to wallpaper again after spending long, dreary hours scraping the stuff off the bathroom walls and watching most of the plaster come off with it. Fortunately, a hopeless optimist responded to our Freecycle offer and is very happy to take the table off our hands. It really should come with a warning, but it won’t be from me. They say you can’t learn from others’ experience and my guess is that most people don’t want to.
Jam jars anyone? Elegant bottles? These represent the vision of myself that shimmers before me rather than the humdrum reality of my life. This vision involves me wafting about wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, carrying a trug over my arm and selecting the ripest specimens from my bountiful harvest. I imagine myself making raspberry jam from our home-grown fruit, chutneys from the sun-ripened figs and infused oils from our abundant fresh herbs.
In fact, I have discovered that raspberries need far more water than our poor parched plants ever get and the few wizened berries are quickly devoured by the local birds. You might expect these over-indulged birds to be content with the specially selected seed mix I give them every morning and leave the fruit alone. They’re not and they don’t. The fig chutney was so sweet that I ended up serving it with ice cream. I did try to make infused oil once, but the basil turned into a soggy, brown mush, making it look like I’d filled the bottle with pond water. My dreams of giving home-made foodie presents for Christmas were dashed. The jars and bottles have to go. Along with the wide-brimmed straw hat.
I’m sure I’ll still be sifting and sorting as the moving men are pulling up in the drive. It’s a compulsion. What could we manage without I wonder? Our poor cat’s starting to look worried.
Once I start the process of clearing it’s endless 🫣 – I have enough shredding of paperwork to fill another house ! Surely some of it can be used on the garden as mulch …. Good luck – I hope your clearing goes better than mine ever does (and I’m not even moving)
And then, of course, there’s electronic tidying – all those photos, emails and documents. It makes you want to go and live in a yurt in the middle of a field.