De-hoarding
I fill the car multiple times with rotting pieces of wood stored in our garage and take them to the recycling centre. I fill bag after bag with fabrics, old blankets, pillows too stained to recover, and bring them to the textile takeback point. I vacuum, everything. Occasionally I break out my special nozzle.
I find my dad's collection of slides - every photograph he took from the 1960s to the 2000s - and digitize them. There are about 3000. It takes days. They all fit on one SD card. Most are landscapes and most are from Ireland, but there are also a lot from my dad's trips to Greece and Yugoslavia in the 1970s: once driving with his best friend, once hitch-hiking solo. There are photos of Dubrovnik before Serbia bombed it and before cruise ships and Game of Thrones fans ruined it. I can even retrace his route to the Black Sea via the border control stamps on his old passport. There are childhood photos of me.
I mop walls and ceilings, scrub radiators, clean windows. I find two locked chests from decades ago without a key. I watch a YouTube tutorial on how to open them with a small screwdriver and, to my amazement, it works. Inside: rugs, bedding, pottery. There's a Boer War commemorative mug from 1900 and Gladstone glassware from 1869. Sandwiched between the rugs and bedding for safekeeping, there's also £410 in 1980s banknotes. I mail it to the Bank of England for conversion. I also file a claim for a £20 traveller's cheque on the American Express website.
All in all, I'm 60% done. More, maybe. I'm about to finalize five rooms. Yet the initial euphoria is gone; with the stuff relocated, rehabilitated, recycled, donated or otherwise disposed of, the interior of the house itself is far more visible. At first I was delighted at the transformation, the newfound airiness and usability, but now all I see is dated decor, cracked ceilings, worn carpet, peeling wallpaper, crumbling plaster, rotting skirting board. I tell myself this is good, that it means the stuff isn't the problem anymore. I try to put myself in the head of a Normal Person walking into the house for the first time. Will it look like a Normal House to them? Will it look like a hoarder house? Will it just look weird? But it's hard; I can't see the house through neutral eyes. I have lost objectivity.
Two police officers come to interview me regarding my complaint about the guy on our street who has been firing some kind of powerful air weapon into other people's gardens, towards a public footpath, and across the busy main road. They catch me off-guard; I'm in a towel with conditioner in my hair. While I rush upstairs and change, they wait for me in the freshly decluttered front sitting room. I return downstairs and sit on a chair that couldn't be sat on before. The male police officer notices how flustered I am and asks me some low-key personal questions to get things going. "What's your favourite place to visit?" I say "Poland."
They question me thoroughly and I give a signed statement. I take them through into the kitchen - now the cleanest, most decluttered room in the house - to show them where he has been firing towards and from which window. The male police officer is fascinated by our kitchen. "I've never seen a cheeseboard like that!" "An old Quality Street tin!" "Is that Tupperware?" "Do you grate garlic with this?" "My parents had that spice rack when I was growing up!" "Look at the old cookbooks!"
I say "It's like a time capsule in here."
My mum and I use up sachets of airline salt and pepper in our meals, some from airlines that no longer exist. There are beautiful Aegean Airlines sugar sachets with pictures of Greek flowers on. My mum puts the sugar in her hot chocolate.
My perception has changed. Clean is a harder state to maintain than dirty; keeping a house decluttered is harder than keeping it cluttered. Active management in place of passive decay. Even a clean floor or window with a single speck of dirt looks dirty. Fleetingly, I miss the old me that wouldn't have noticed.
My mum has been an enthusiastic and thankful participant at every step of the way. Like many others her age, she wasn't prepared to enter a world of Stuff, a consumer society where items are disposable and replaceable. Both of her parents grew up in sheep-farming communities in neighboring Cumberland valleys. "The day they married, my dad had £5 in his pocket and my mam had the clothes she stood up in."
There's an 1897 newspaper clipping about my great-great-grandfather. He was having a "thrashing machine" delivered to the farm by steam engine, and two small bridges collapsed under its weight. No-one was hurt. I pull up the bathroom carpet. Beneath it, half-welded to the cork flooring, is a 2015 Specsavers brochure with Gok Wan on the front.
We've transitioned from a culture of scarcity to a culture of plenty, and it didn't come with a roadmap. I ask myself what's worse: an elderly man who hoards dozens of tins of food because his childhood was etched with hunger, married to an elderly lady who doesn't want to give away all her old dresses that she can't fit into anymore because they remind her of precious moments in her life - or a young suburbanite who constantly wastes food because he orders more than he needs or forgets about it and lets it expire, living with a girlfriend who buys brand new fast-fashion garments from Primark every couple of weeks and wears them once or twice each before throwing them away?
My friend The Gay Electrician is coming in a few weeks to upgrade our electrics. He says he's going to stick his testing equipment in my sockets, and so all my sockets need to be clean and accessible. This has given me fresh impetus.