Stuff

Today

"Which is worse", asked Beatrice "to still have singles by Gilbert O'Sullivan or by The Seekers?" The consensus seems to be that G O'S is worse.

But what fascinates me is that she and Nell still have these items, forty-odd years on, and have carried them with them from place to place and, for Beatrice, through three marriages. What made her feel that it was worth filling a packing case with them?

In My Day

They say that 3 house moves equal one house fire in terms of what is lost. I certainly have very little of what I started out with when I first left home. I didn't have very much, it's true, and probably had no way of playing records in my student digs. So much would have been left at 4BH. Mamma and Daddy moved to Ribblesdale in Dorking while I was still at college in about 1969. Shoe-horning their own possessions into a two-bedroomed bungalow must have been challenging enough, without continuing to give house-room to my stuff.

So I expect that much would have been chucked out. Maybe I became accustomed to letting my things go and perhaps I'm a "chucker-out" by nature. I find the thought of a loft full of now unused items quite burdensome.

So, what did  I think was worth carrying with me through about a dozen changes of home? My sewing machine and fabrics, to be sure. Clothes, of course, although many are chucked out on a routine basis. Until I was married, about the only books that came with me were, for some reason, Mamma's art books;  as I write I can see the large format Phaidon Boticelli book that I so loved as a child, and Laine's Arabian Nights - now down to three volumes - will anyone admit to having the fourth? I still have the first piece of "art" embroidery that I did for A-level and will mount and frame it one day. Lizzie has my old diaries.

The truth is that, almost all that I have now I acquired since I moved to Somerset, even diaries and archival material; a few bits of artwork done by the girls remain. And I certainly have no old singles purchased when I was eighteen.

Several of my friends still have their, now grown-up, children's clutter filling up their houses. This may include their old favourite CDs which could surface to ridicule in thirty years' time, who knows?