I know that listening to me talking about tidying up is just about the most boring thing possible - but bear with me.. I need to feel as if I'm doing something useful, and writing about it helps me get my plans in order. :-)
I have a feeling that I'm going to be tidying up for many months to come. I like to think that I've been doing something, but I wonder whether my progress is that significant. After all, while I can now see the wall which was previously covered by floor-to-ceiling boxes, this comes at the cost that I can no longer see my bed, which is now covered in most of the boxes that I moved out of the way of the wall. A picture is shown above. Do you see? My bed is somewhere under there.
My problems are manyfold. Much space is taken up by items which loosely fall into several groups:
Paper - I'm getting fairly good about throwing away old magazines - but not really really old magazines, because those are of historical interest and so must be preserved. Most of the rest of the 'paper' that's not shreddable is stuff that I can at least scan and store away onto the computer, where it takes up no space. So a strategy is in place to get rid of this.
Videotapes - Back in the 18th century there was something called VHS, and in the 17th century there was Betamax. I have lots of both. I bought lots of old Betamax tapes on eBay several years ago, on account of their immense historical interest. The VHS tapes were just ones that I needed to record on. But I had no cataloguing system and never labelled a tape after the age of about 25, so it turns out I have lots of boxes of tapes which all need to be laboriously viewed before I can realistically get rid of them. Old Betamax tapes fetch good prices on eBay, so no problem there. Old VHS is entirely unwanted and doesn't seem to sell for even 99p. I suspect I might have to give them away. Even though I hardly use videotapes any more, I absolutely cannot consider throwing them away. They have to go to good homes. I hope I can find some.
Boxes - it sounds odd, but it seems somehow wrong to throw away the original boxes that something came in. After all, what if I need to sell it on eBay in the future? An original box makes things easier to sell. What if I need to package it up again, if I should ever move home? An original box makes it easy. Is this stupid?
Unclassified Clutter - I have boxes full of miscellaneous bits and pieces that I just never got round to sorting out. A funny red Playstation controller. An authentic 1982 Sketch-A-Graph drawing thing. Boxes of floppy discs, the big kind. A Sony Walkman which may or may not work.
Sellables - I have several more boxes full of things which I need to sell on eBay, and which, ungratefully, nobody has yet purchased. But they will do, one day. Hopefully.
With so much building up around my ears, yesterday I was starting to feel a little despondent and wondered if I would ever progress my tidying enough that I might ever be able to stop sleeping on the couch. But after a little while, my ruthless spirit returned, and I was good.
One point of particular stickiness is that I seem to have kept all the exercise books from my school years. Now, I left school nearly 19 years ago, and those books have not come in too useful since then. But somehow it always seemed wrong to throw them away. Even when I unearthed them at the bottom of a tea chest several days ago, I couldn't immediately dispose of them. My instinct was, in fact, to keep these precious artefacts. Or at least to scan them - ultimately a hideously time-consuming process, but if that's what I need to do to let myself free the space occupied by their physical form, then I'll do it.
It took me a little while to rebuild my 'ruthless' streak enough to take action. In all my tidying up I've been very much inspired by the re-runs of 'Life Laundry' on UK Style, where people are harrassed into tidying their homes by a strange American lady called Donna Walter. (Except she says, and even spells it, as "Dawna Walter".)
Dawna, for it is she, would doubtless be going nuts if she had heard about me keeping my schoolbooks, and would in fact be delivering her trademark lecture (as delivered in every edition of Life Laundry) informing me that holding on to such useless things is me failing to let go of a painful part of my life, or something like that, so therefore only the ritual destruction of such items can truly free me from the evil vibrations of the past. (OK, she doesn't come across as quite so crazy on the TV, but if you buy the Life Laundry audio CD, as I did, she starts talking about all kinds of transcendental vibrations and other such oddities.)
But you know someting - Dawna might just have a point. I don't need my schoolbooks. There is nothing of me there. It's my handwriting, but it isn't me. It's answers to pointless maths questions. It's answers to textbook questions in French. It's the results of pointless experiments in Chemistry class. It's not like a diary. It's not some priceless 'early writings' by the internationally renowned Ant, discovered after all these years. It's just rubbish. And I need to let it go. Because even at the age of 34, I still regularly dream about being at school. And you know something? I don't think I actually go to school any more. I don't think I've gone for nearly 19 years now. So maybe I should let these books go.
And I did! I was awfully good, and shredded the lot. (Couldn't just put them in the bin as-is, after all.) Dawna would have been so pleased.
Tidying up is an expensive business, though. In this past month or so I've already had to purchase several items to assist me with the finer points of tidying. I'm very pleased with the shredder I mentioned a few weeks ago. It's still working (a miracle in itself) and has already shredded considerable amounts of paper which I would otherwise have probably just held onto.
I was thinking about buying one of those USB record turntables that you can plug into your computer, to turn all your old vinyl records into MP3s. OK, I don't have much vinyl, and nothing that I've listened to in.. 20 years. But I still reckon that it would be so much easier to throw it away if it wasn't my only copy of something that I might just one day want to listen to again. Admittedly the chances are slim that I would want to listen to "50 fabulous Disney classics" - an utterly awful double-album which I didn't like that much even when I was 7 - but I would be happy to throw it away once it has been digitally preserved. So, turntables.. I'm still thinking about this purchase.
This evening I've ordered some large packing boxes. I think these are going to be helpful, as I've run out of the other storage boxes I've been shoving things into while trying to get them into some kind of order. Plus, I've noticed that a lot of the things I'd like to get rid of are the awkward kind of things that won't sell on eBay (either too obscure or too heavy, and therefore unpostable.) So, the plan is that I'll be making up several boxes of "nice stuff I don't want but can't sell" and donate these to some local charities. I hope they like floppy disc boxes, I have lots of those. I have a feeling that there'll be plenty of large (heavy) books and clothes too. But for this to happen, they need a place to live while they're being sorted. These new boxes will be that place. See, I have a plan.
Last week, as I tidied and came across various bits and pieces, I started sticking them up on eBay. Start price just 99p, seller pays postage - let's see if anyone wants the stuff. Happily this actually worked out pretty well, with 9 out of the 10 items selling. I've just finished wrapping them up to take down the post office tomorrow. I got rid of several very large items which were taking up space but were "too nice to trash", including an older, noisier shredder, a large laptop bag, part of a satellite dish, and even some t-shirts which I never got around to wearing. The sales didn't make me a millionaire but they brought me something more important - space. And that's what I need right now.
In preparation for my renewed ruthlessness I have purchased a very large roll of rubbish bags, which I imagine over the course of the next few weeks will be mostly filled with shredding and any small items that I feel comfortable about tossing out entirely. And, hey, I've been good and thrown away several more things that I don't think I need. Amongst other items having left the house in a bin bag include a battered 'Junior Science Encyclopaedia' which in my youthful exuberance I wrote all over (this is something I seemed to do a lot in my youth), an obscure MB game called 'Bali', and a pack of playing cards. (Even I don't think those might come in useful!)
I threw away a pink plastic pig full of drawing pins, only to immediately experience the sheer pain of needing some drawing pins (for the first time in years) the very next day. But I made do with some double-sided sticky tape instead, and I think maybe that's a better solution as well.
But in the midst of all this chaos, pleasure comes from the simplest things. This morning I bought a bag of cable ties, which means that I can now easily seal up my bags full of shredding and rubbish, without having to fight to tie some kind of knot in the top of them. This one thing alone has made me very pleased indeed, and I cannot express how amazingly excellent this little step forward is. I guess it's the little things that make the difference.
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