… so much stuff belonging to my father. And yet there is still so much left.
I should start by saying that most of the hard work of getting rid of things has been done by my brothers, and I have mostly been saying goodbye at the point of seeing a familiar item in the auction catalogue and going, “oh, yes, that…”
That’s accounted for a lot of the bulky items. Some stuff has gone to the tip. The rest of it…
If you ever met my father, you probably saw one of these stickers. He stuck them on everything – suitcase, diary, camera bag – and had been doing so since the mid 1970s, when his bus was part of the artichoke sponsored Tour de France publicity caravan. There is still a huge stash left.
There is a lot of stuff like that: cool story, no monetary value to speak of, about twenty times as much as anyone ever needed to keep. Or, in some cases, quite possibly some monetary value, if only one could find the person who wants it and work out how to get it to them. Or, of no interest whatsoever except to the family.
My next door neighbour died a couple of months ago. Her son rented a skip. Everything went in the skip. The house is now up for sale.
Could we learn from him? Probably. Except… I myself rescued a chair and two icons from the skip, the icons because it felt sacrilegious to leave them there (they can go to a charity shop) and the chair because it was far too beautiful to be thrown away. So no, I’m probably constitutionally incapable of chucking everything in a skip. Particularly when today I went through the 78rpm records and claimed one of Amelita Galli-Curci singing Julius Benedict’s La Capinera. Or, a rare recording of one of the greatest singers of all time singing an all but forgotten piece by my great-great-great-grandfather. No, it’s not going in a skip.
So we’ll still be saying goodbye to stuff into 2025. But please, please, not much longer.
Kathleen Jowitt 