The stuff

 So I have spent the last couple of weeks reviewing our home and the belongings inside it, thinking what to keep and what to move on.

A priority was to dispense with anything I couldn't easily move. 

We had a huge armchair.

In my room I had a very heavy chest of drawers.

In one of our downstairs rooms was a pretty but heavy chest of drawers with a marble top. The (removable) top by itself was quite a weight, and it was the sort of piece of furniture you have to walk across the room because you can't lift it.

So those have either gone or been spoken for and are now awaiting collection. Our beds are heavy and our sofa and Tony's armchair, but hey — those things have to stay or life would become too uncomfortable.

I went ruthlessly through my clothes and got them down to a small collection of garments that all go together, wash easily, and layer to accommodate the changes in weather. Consequently I was also able to move on a collection of excellent clothes hangers.

I chucked out all the stupid little knick-knacks from the kitchen — the soup whizzer and egg beater and tea-bag squeezer and potato peeler and toaster etc etc. We have a knife to chop veggies for soup. We have a grill to make toast (if we ever eat bread again, which I doubt). We have a fork to whisk eggs.  All that sort of thing has gone. 

I had some books picked up second-hand from a stall at Sainsburys that, honestly, I will never read. I've moved them on.

What remains is relatively easy to organise and find and look after. I've still got too many socks, because not only has our Alice knitted me several beautiful pairs over the years, but also my hubby was tossing out his very good Bridgedale hiking socks at some point, and I stupidly said I'd have them (so now I do have them).

But overall we are left with a house that feels easy to clean and that has plenty of peaceful breathing room.

I have two uh-oh categories left. There's a box of stationery — I'll definitely use the gift-wrap, but maybe not so much the accumulation of unused envelopes in random shapes. I have several pads of writing paper in there, and I don't send many handwritten letters these days (but I might, given the extent that Big Brother has decided to watch us all whether we like it or not). And I have a bigger collection than is ideal of letters received that meant a lot to me. Oh — and in terms of digital clutter, I'd be most happy to move on from Gmail except that I have such a massive archive going back sixteen years, tracking all my professional correspondence and medical history and personal interactions with people who contacted me through my blog, plus the correspondence detailing various family interactions — all of it important and amounting to thousands of emails. It would require a lot of courage to walk away from it and close the door. What Carlos Castenada said in Journey to Ixtlan:  

“I have no routines or personal history. One day I found out that they were no longer necessary for me and, like drinking, I dropped them. One must have the desire to drop them and then one must proceed harmoniously to chop them off, little by little. If you have no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with your acts. And above all no one pins you down with their thoughts. It is best to erase all personal history because that makes us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people. I have, little by little, created a fog around me and my life. And now nobody knows for sure who I am or what I do. Not even I. How can I know who I am, when I am all this?”

That has been food for thought for me for decades. So what it comes down to in the end is that the biggest challenges for me are socks, stationery and email. Hmm. How to address it?