Dealing With The Past

A post from 13 years ago.

IDLE THOUGHTS

The alarm goes off at 7am and I hit the snooze button.

7:05am RINGGG! I'm wondering what to do about the vintage Orange Order collarette in the attic. I hit the snooze button.

7:10am RINGGG! Trying to figure out the names of Adam Lambsbreath's cows in Cold Comfort Farm. Let me see - there's Pointless, Aimless, Feckless and what is the other one called? I hit the snooze button.

7:15am RINGGG! Pondering the minister's reading at yesterday's funeral service. Dorcas/Tabitha. Would those be good names for girl twins? Technically they are the same name just as Zoe and Eve are. I hit the snooze button.

7:20am RINGGGG!!!! There's this clairvoyant in Randalstown I'm going to later. She channels through an eel. Holy shit! I'm dreaming! Time to get up.

An unpublished one from 9 years ago

Every couple of years I clear the attic but this clearing has to the best one yet. I do have sticking places. Anything that came from Matty's house and all that old loyal orders paraphernalia that belonged to Bert's uncles. What happened to Johnny's stuff? He must have returned it to the lodge when it was dissolved. Uncle Andy died in harness or should that be in collarette?

Banjo Man came in and I was telling him about my efforts to declutter,

I don't know what I'm going to do with all that old loyal orders stuff.

Would somebody not want it? The lodge maybe, part of their history?

All those lodges are no more.

What about Ploppy Pants?

Not his thing. He's independent.

Doesn't seem right to throw it out. I know its not our culture but...

I know. Showing respect and all that..

Or...

What?

You could just burn it.

The Present Day

So what did I do? I packed up Andy's white gloves, apron and collarette and donated them to a charity shop in Harryville. The lady in charge was delighted as she had a customer who collected that kind of memorabilia.

Showing respect and all that. We still have several framed certificates in the attic. They are rather large and the frames are in poor condition. I expect we'll leave them for the next generation to worry about.

Looking Back

A post from ten years ago....

Pruck

People take different approaches to organising their stuff. One thing is constant - the more stuff a body owns, the harder that stuff is to organise.

We knew somebody once cleared his house regularly. His credo was - if he hadn't used it in the past year out it went.

Stuff can take you over. The trick is if you bring new stuff in then heave the equivalent amount of stuff out. Easier said than done.

Which brings me back to the Nessie problem. She is one of those people, as is her partner, to whom stuff flies like iron filings to a magnet. Got some unwanted stuff - Nessie will have that. The end result is that her house contains so much stuff that there is no room for a normal life to take place. Sit at the table to eat a meal? Impossible. The table is stacked high with stuff. Prepare a meal? Not possible. Food consists of uncooked items; the current favourite being scallion sandwiches. Neighbours do provide plated food but that is mostly fed to the collies.

Nessie has never thrown out a loaf paper in her life. There are tens of thousands of loaf papers stacked to the ceiling. What Hannah couldn't get over was the wall of cushions. Most people use cushions to add a little comfort to their lives. Nessie builds walls with cushions. Polystyrene carry out containers? Nessie never parts with these useful items. She'd use them under plant pots if she had room for plants.

I'd guess Nessie hasn't a clue what is in the boxes and bags of stuff that she has piled high to the ceiling. Somewhere in there, and it may never be found, is her mother's wedding ring. The same wedding ring that caused a massive fall-out with her sister Pearlie many, many years ago.

Stuff. Wedding rings. Loaf papers. Cushions. Nice wee tins. Buttons. Old magazines. Odds and ends of wool. Bits of scrap metal. Old clothes. Patchwork quilts. Books that we'll never open again. Clutter. Yours is shite. Mine is treasure.

Crazy Jack and the Chickpeas

So, after I cleaned my grubby spice rack the next spot to tackle was the store cupboard. While there were no unpleasant surprises in the larder there were some elderly dried goods such as an unopened 2kg bag of chickpeas older than Martha. The cupboard was crammed with chickpeas both dried and tinned and obviously we never eat them except for that time Bert took a great notion of making hummus. The 2kg bag will be used as animal feed and I'll have to hoke out that hummus recipe for Bert.

The oldest item in the cupboard was the organic brown rice. If that packet of unopened brown rice were a child it would be at secondary school by now. What kind of idiot lets packets of food sit on her shelves for endless years? What type of deluded fool keeps buying chickpeas and then has them languish in her cupboard for over a decade? If it were another person with a store of ancient food in their pantries I'd call that person a food hoarder.

If anyone has any delicious recipes where chickpeas are one of the main ingredient please let me know.

Pot, Kettle And All That Sort Of Thing

Today Bert called me a hoarder. He said,

You know, you're a hoarder.

I said,

I know. And so are you. State of those sheds.

He did not reply.

The reason for this? He was clearing out his a cupboard in his room and was about to bin several boxes of his mother's memorabilia, old letters, postcards and the like.

I said,

She might enjoy looking at those.

Ah. Sure I gave her a packet of them. That'll do her.

Later on I went into her and she was poring over old letters and cards. I said,

There were more of those. Bert put them in the bin.

She said,

Ach! They bring me back memories.

I borrowed her tool for lifting items off the floor and retrieved as much as I could from the bin. Luckily they were newly emptied so there was little else in the bin. She passed the afternoon with them.

Bert's sheds are packed with stuff. I expect most of it will come in useful some day. There are a lot of potential projects out there. The thing is, he'd need to live to 150 years old to complete those projects - if he could be arsed.

He keeps stuff, I keep stuff, his mother keeps stuff. I had a debate with her this morning about whether she should keep an empty plastic soft drink container. She desired to decant her Lucozade into it even though Lucozade already comes in a plastic bottle. She is saving the tops of plastic bottles because she believes that somewhere there is someone who can turn plastic bottle caps into wheelchairs for needy children. I have told her that this is a crock of nonsense but she does not believe me. Yesterday we had a small argument about keeping bottles of spent medicine.

When Pearlie was up and about she collected and hoarded on a larger scale. She still does it although her lack of mobility prevents her from being really serious about it. These days it is newspaper clippings, bottle tops, over the counter medicines and postage stamps. Sure what is the harm? She's done it all her life, it's part of who she is and it doesn't really impinge on our lives.

I collect books, china, photographs, fabric and kitchen equipment. The books and china do take up a lot of room. Bert collects wood, maps, trees and boiler suits. We're all every bit as bad as each other. But he has sheds. And fields.

Her Last Drink

My current obsession is hoarding behaviour, the American TV series Hoarders and tossing my own hoard. It's rather wonderful. I watch a little bit of Hoarders and I am inspired to throw out some object I've clung on to for far too long. I don't want to end up like those poor American folks, although I can see I'm going to have to be careful about the animal hoarding. Four dogs, two cats and two pigs - that is Nellybert at the limit.

A friend of mine is helping an elderly relative declutter her house. During the process a cardboard box of assorted glassware was unearthed. The elderly relative said,

Dinnae throw those out! There's a special glass amongst those. It's the glass that Davy's mother took her last drink out of.

Davy's mother was this old girl's mother-in-law and Davy was her husband dead himself this forty years or more.

I told this to Bert.

Imagine! Clinging on to an oul glass because your mother-in-law took her last drink out of it!

I wonder what her last drink was?

Some class of poison? That might explain the sentimental attachment.

There Would Always Be String

Some odds and ends of Mum's needed a final sort out. These were photographs that had been removed from her picture frames, a few newspaper cuttings and a lot of greetings cards. They were stashed in the room that I'm intending to turn into a workroom and it needs dealt with for it is very cluttered.

Throwing Mum's stuff away is not easy to do. I found the assorted greeting cards the hardest to dispose of for she had kept so many of them, some even dating from more than thirty years ago. My parents had seven children, eight grandchildren and lots of friends so they got a lot of cards. As I hesitated over this one or that one I had to keep reminding myself that a bunch of cards are not a measure of how much Seamus and Matty were loved. I did keep a few – mostly because they were particularly pretty and some because they contained messages that would have meant a lot to my parents.

I am going to have to watch for that sentimental hoarding streak for I don't want to leave my children the chore of going through the amount of crap that Pearlie had packed away. Mum kept stuff, maybe a little too much stuff, but it did not impede her life.

Recently Bert and I watched a terribly sad documentary* about a man, Richard Wallace, who had accumulated so much clutter in his home and garden that he only had a crawl space in his home to get around. His cooking area consisted of a gas ring piled on each side with stacks of newspapers and magazines. His only bit of comfort in that junk-packed house was a chair in front of a tiny television set. He slept in that chair. That poor man was in despair with his life, which he called 'an existence', but his urge to hoard was too strong for him to resist.

All Pearlie's sisters have or have had hoarding tendencies. Bert's Aunt Nessie lived a lot like poor Richard Wallace. I wrote about her a few years ago while she was still alive.

Bert's Aunt Nessie keeps, among other things, every loaf wrapping she's ever had - in case they should come in useful. Now if I were to list all the things that Nessie hoards I'd be here all day. Enough to say that there is just one narrow path through her house that is filled to the rafters with stuff. It is a blessing unto God that she never goes out to get more stuff and a further blessing that she only spends about three and sixpence a week so the amount of stuff trickling into her house these days is very minimal.

Nessie was definitely the worst afflicted with the hoarding compulsion. The other three sisters crammed their homes with knick knacks, linens and so on but Nessie gathered up stuff that was actually rubbish. I never visited Nessie's home as for obvious reasons she did not welcome visitors. If people did call she came out and spoke to them in the front yard.

Compulsive hoarding severely affected Nessie's quality of life and I believe that her persistent health problems were exacerbated by it. Living like she did made it impossible to maintain the house and her roof was in poor repair and none of her windows or doors were fit for purpose. This made the house cold and damp. Her house was condemned by the local housing authority and they were prepared to knock it down and rebuild but she refused this offer outright. In many ways Nessie was her own worst enemy.

These days Bert has only the one aunt left and she is over eighty now and not as able as she used to be. She has two younger friends who are trying right now to declutter her home so that she can get around more easily. Sadly she is not enjoying this process and is resistant to everything that they are trying to achieve.

I will say this about Bert's mum – she might have hoarded a great quantity of stuff that was not always as useful or as pretty as she thought it was but she was a great curator of The Museum of Pearlie. She pretty much knew where most things were and she labelled everything. When I was packing up her previous abode I found a box neatly packed and labelled 'Rubbish'.

In Pearlie's day she hoarded margarine tubs by the score. I don't know what she ever intended to use them for. She kept plastic bags, rubber bands and great quantities of string. She never threw out a button, a used stamp, a letter or a piece of yarn. Occasionally Bert will be looking for string and there will be none and he'll say, “In Pearlie's day there would always be string!”

So I suppose there are good and bad aspects to holding on to things. The thing is to be organised and always know where they are. Many is the time that I have had to buy something I knew I already had (somewhere) because the task of looking for it was too arduous. Hopefully this will change in 2012 – the year of living simply and cutting the crap.

By the way Pearlie is still hoarding in a small way. She is collecting obituaries from the local papers and the caps from her Fortisip containers. The obituaries I understand, the bottle tops not so much - except that they are a beautiful shade of lilac. Old habits are very hard to break.

*Channel 4's Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder

The documentary focused on Richard Wallace, whose 30-year hoarding habit has prevented him from having a bath and a single night's sleep in his bed for years. "It's getting a bit silly now," he admits, and yet he appears to be unable to stop the compulsion to hoard.

This Is Puck, The Redfern Duck

If you arrive at work with wet woollen gloves, pull each one over the bottom of a small jar. Stand open ends of jar on a radiator. Gloves will dry in half the time it usually takes.

* * * *

To get nuts out of their shells in one piece, soak them in salt and water for a few hours.

* * * *

To prevent a cake being overfired on top, run cold water over buttered greaseproof paper. Shake well and place over cake before putting in the oven.

* * * *

The clearing out of Pearlie’s previous abode continues. It goes slowly because I cannot resist reading every magazine or newspaper cutting she ever kept. One thing I have no trouble disposing of are the gospel tracts. She kept all of these and there must have been hundreds of them stashed here and there. It gladdened my black Catholic heart to cast these good Protestant missives in the trash bin. I was a lot less cavalier about disposing of the scores of bibles she kept. At one point in his life Bert’s father was a Sunday school teacher and the family has gathered more bibles than a horse has hairs.

The vast collection of biros has also been tossed. After years and years they just stop working and if Pearlie had enough spare hours in her day to test old pens, I don’t. I’m far too busy stacking bibles, trashing tracts and reading ancient household tips.

Pearlie also kept little cuttings that took her fancy. I liked this old style advertisement.

This is Puck, the Redfern Duck

The wet he never feels,

Because his boots are watertight

With Redfern's Soles and Heels

The Big Clear Out

Bert has been clearing out his homeplace for a couple of months now. It had become too difficult for his widowed mother to manage. She is now living in an all mod cons mobile a few yards from the old house.

The clear out has had its moments. His mother was and is a hoarder and there was stuff in there from the beginning of time. For instance she still has his old pram and other baby equipment. Babies were a rarity in her generation. There were four sisters of them and she is the only one to have produced a sprog. Imagine how spoiled he was. He says he wasn’t but then he would say that.

At first she followed him about, terrified that he would dump something precious. At least it got her moving and all her bric a brac is now packed away in the mobile. I was up with her one day and she said “I’m that vexed with Bertie, he never brushed that carpet before he rolled it up,” I said “Why would he brush it? Sure he’s only going to throw it on the ground somewhere to keep weeds down.” “What!” she cried, “He’s going to throw it out! That’s a good carpet.” This carpet was dirty beige with brown swirly bits. It was an excellent carpet in 1970 and will be damn fine for suppressing weeds in this century.

Bert is now sorting out the toys. He had already given loads away to various children. My own had a dig at them when they were the age for toys. The ones he has kept are mostly battery operated. Tonight he thrust a plastic tank in front of me and asked “Have you any batteries lying about would do that?” I said I hadn’t. He was straight into the van and down to the garage for a battery. Now all he needs are the caps.