Tag Archives: decluttering

General Gleanings

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I found some nice stuff when moving things from one house to the next yesterday. Unfortunately, my feelings of joy were immediately dampened by a run of finding rubbish. The original plan was to leave that in Nottingham and have a skip to take it away. Unfortunately, over the years, things built up and became mixed and it’s become a lot harder to separate the two. This is particularly true at the moment, as I have a bad back and standing for extended periods can be quite trying.

The joy returned when I had an email accepting a poem. It’s a magazine that has published me before, but a new editor, who has constantly turned me down when acting as a guest editor at this magazine and at others. This counts as a small victory on two counts and validates the policy of increasing the number of submissions rather than cherry picking  the ones that are more likely to be successful.

The items were relatively modest, a battered white metal medallion, a worn coin and a 2d transport token.

The Nelson medallion is a membership token for the Shipwrecked Fishermen and Mariners Society. The Society was founded n 1839, so it post-dates Nelson by a few years. This one is dated 1882 and has a number scratched to the left of Nelson’s face – 3157. The slot on the top allows it to be worn on a ribbon as proof of membership. The charity was set up to provide lifeboats and support for shipwrecked sailors or their widows, orphans and parents.  They decided to give up the lifeboats in the 1850s and specialise in the care of survivors and dependents.

The coin is a 1 Franc coin of 1808. The mint Mark “A” seen to the right of the date denotes the Paris Mint. The 1808 A coin makes up 49% of the coin’s mintage and is thus the commonest and cheapest one. Added to its worn condition and this is a coin with a lot of history but not much else going for it. In 1808 Napoleon tried to extend the trade embargo against the UK and invaded the Iberian Peninsula, putting his brother on the throne of Spain and starting the Peninsula war, which would, in 1814, see Wellington’s victorious army sweep into France across the Pyrenees. Sic semper tyrannis.

 

The token is a 2d ticket for one of the Liverpool horse-drawn buses of the 19th Century, probably 1850s – 70s, but I still need to do a bit of work on that one.  This is quite a dark, well-worn specimen, which is good in this context, as somebody mde some copies a few years ago, which always makes me suspicious of examples in good condition.

Declutter, declutter, declutter . . .

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Sorry about the patchy service. I’m currently splitting my time between two houses and spending more time driving than tidying. One is gradually emptying and the other is gradually filling, We have also got rid of some stuff – around 150 books and three bags of clothes yesterday. It seemed  lot, but hen I look round I can’t see a difference. I’m now afraid I’m going to fill the new house with clutter before we manage to empty the old one. It’s a strange thing to fear, and definitely falls into the category of  First World Problem.

It all goes back to something in my childhood. I don’t know what, but there are lots of internet sites willing to discuss the problem of hoarding in the context of mental illness and childhood roots.

Autumn _ Arnot Hill Park

My grandfather was a hoarder. He had a cellar with four rooms in it, five if you count the coal bunker (with external chute). One was full of tools and stuff. one was full of scrap timber, a third had more timber and the fourth opened onto a rock wall with ferns and running water. It must have been something to do with building and foundations, or it might merely have been a portal to as wet, cold magical realm. I wasn’t quite clear at the time and am none the wiser now.

It took me months to clear it out for my grandmother and, forty years later, I still have many of the tools in my garage.

I’m not sure if he suffered childhood trauma. It wasn’t a great childhood, leaving school with a special license at the age of 12 to work to support his mother and young brother (his father was an invalid after an industrial accident), but I’m not sure if it was traumatic either. People just got on with it in my day. My great-great aunt, as I have probably told you, was not much older than my grandmother. She broke off her engagement in 1919 and gave up the opportunity to move to Canada so she could look after my orphaned grandmother. She could have been a bitter women, but was in fact one of the most cheerful people I have ever met. In WW2 she worked in a mill and took in refugees. That generation didn’t traumatise easily.

Time, I think, to throw more stuff out and pull myself together.

Autumn Leaves – Rufford Abbey

 

Time, Decluttering, Fish and Chips

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Sorry, time slips by and it’s soon a couple of day since I wrote anything or read anything. I do try to keep up with my comments but that’s all I’ve done, in a blogging sense, for the last few days. I have been to a few charity shops to dispose of various bits of clutter (I can’t believe some of the things we’ve accumulated), we’ve also been down to Peterborough (mainly to see a builder) and today we dropped off at another charity shop, visited Julia’s old base (to drop off craft supplies we don’t need) and spent nearly an hour doing a twenty minute journey to \IKEA, where we once again couldn’t park within a distance I couldn’t walk. I really am going to have to get a Blue Badge.

Yesterday we spent £32 on two lunches at the garden centre nearest to the new bungalow.  It was a fact finding mission and the main fact I found was that I won’t be eating there again. It was fish and chips, which is no longer cheap food for the working classes. The fish, I admit, was very good – nice thick, fresh fillets in crispy batter. The tartare sauce was good. The peas were mediocre, which isn’t good enough for £16. And the chips were excellent, Thick, golden, well cooked – everything you would want from a chip. However, there weren’t many of them. I don’t like it when chip shops pile the chips on to make it look like you are getting plenty for your money, but I like it even less when you get a small portion. I don’t expect to pay £16 and leave the table feeling hungry.

Once we move we will be reviewing more food, so we might go back to check it out again. |On the other hand there are plenty of garden centres in Peterborough with better food and better plants, so we might not.

Pictures are going to be pictures of other fish and chips we have had. I seem to have a lot of fish and chip photos.

Haddock Special at the Dolphin Fish Bar, Sutton on Sea

Of Books and Battles . . .

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So many things to write about, and very little actually written.

This seems to be the story of my life. I actually settled down and finished two short articles for the Numismatic Society Facebook page. They took ten months, most of which was procrastination. The second stage was to piece things together slowly, followed by editing and thinking. Or, in other words, self-deception and procrastination. Then I finished them off in an evening. That’s it. Ten months wasting time and an evening of work. If you can call sitting at a keyboard work.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Somehow, the decluttering process has ground to a halt and I seem to have done little apart from make the house more cluttered.It is one of life’s ironies how this happens. Tomorrow all the old and damaged books that aren’t wanted by charity shops will be off to waste paper. It is time to be ruthless. Most of them should have gone years ago, but they came to me in various ways and I didn’t have the heart to do it. Now, when it’s a case of them or me, I am finally developing the necessary killer instinct. Nobody wants books on fifty year old sales techniques. My Dad didn’t want them, which is how I ended up with them. I don’t want them but somehow they mutated from being old books to being part of my life. It’s stupid really, and probably reveals more about my mental state than my reading habits. Just because you remember things from childhood doesn’t mean you hve to keep them. After all, I remember polio, but I wouldn’t want it.

I actually tripped over a pile of books a couple of nights ago. I manged to grab a chair and avoided an actual fall, but if it’s war they want, it’s war they can have.

I’m going to put the kettle on, open Fahrenheit 451 and plan a surprise attack on . . .

. . . well, it wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you, would it?

Stack of books burning

A New-style Monday

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I rose at my normal time and took Julia to work this morning. It might be a day off, but after a few weeks the novelty of having a lie-in while she struggles on her two bus trip to work has worn off. It’s a rehearsal for retirement – I can either show some discipline and do stuff, or I can decline into a grumpy watcher of daytime TV. It’s a tricky choice but I have decided to do things while I still can.

After that I will become a grumpy watcher of daytime TV. Grumpy is easy enough, but I may have to pay for some better TV.

Second, I made a drink and set to with a submission for a poetry magazine. It involved editing a few poems that had been returned (it’s strange how you can see improvements once they come back).

I then relaxed with another drink  and read a few blogs.

It’s time for lunch next, using more of the  Sweet Potato and Chilli Soup.

After that, the plan is to do some decluttering and do another set of submissions but experience suggests I will probably watch TV and fall asleep for most of the afternoon. This life/work balance stuff is quite tricky. I’ve been decluttering for weeks now and only succeeded in moving a few things around. One small bag did eventually move as far as the bin, but it’s not an impressive record and Julia is talking about having a go herself, meaning that more of my carefully collected treasures will be at risk. Once she gets going she knows no mercy where my stuff is concerned. Her own stuff, however, seems to spread throughout the house, because you always need wool and fabric bits and half-finished cross stitch kits . . .

That, it seems, is a Well Known Fact.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Back to Work – Day 3 – The Owner Returns & I Make Plans

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We had a quiet morning. I had all the parcels done before my workmate arrived, the customers filtered in, we bought, we sold and we relaxed. The owner returned home in the early afternoon and came to work immediately as he arranged to meet a client. Personally, I would have left it until Monday, but that’s life at the cutting edge of retail.

My new glasses are performing well, though a couple of bits of plastic in frame shouldn’t be too difficult to manufacture and there’s a limit to the number of things that can be wrong. The main problem I find is that the frames aren’t wide enough, which eventually makes them crack. these have sprung hinges, so that won’t happen. Actually, they aren’t glasses, are they? They have no glass in them.

I now have a timeline for retirement. It needs a few more details but we seem to have covered all the main points. The difficult part is knowing the best time for us to retire as Julia is younger than me. We want to be in the bungalow for Christmas next year but that’s nearly a year before she retires. I don’t think it’s worth worrying about, but she seems to be vacillating about whether retire to early or not. I get so annoyed by the way she’s treated at work I’ve suggested that she retires now, as we won’t be much worse off and can work round it. We do, after all, have a low cost lifestyle.

Books . . .

I am going to start adding more tasks to the timeline, plus mileposts, Key Performance Indicators, landmarks and a roadmap. I may have made some of them up, but you get the idea. I will be writing about targets soon, so had better brush up on my jargon so I can sound knowledgeable.

Books are going first. Some will be offered to specialist dealers or go into auction, many will go to charity shops and quite a few are destined for recycling. Some books, it pains me to admit, are just not worth anything. Some of them haven’t been opened for thirty years, so I’m not going to spend good money on transport just so I can clutter up another house. Those days have gone.

I will be putting parts of my collection on eBay, starting in the autumn, and other bits and pieces are destined for auction or a skip. I still have a lot of stuff inherited from my grandfather – including a magnifier for a 1950s TV (they only had 7″ screens in those days), a valve tester and a variety of hand tools that I will never use.

There are also 12 plastic boxes of military surplus clothing from my market days in the garage. They have been unreachable for ten years and if they aren’t mouse bedding by now they will be going to the charity.

The more I think of it, the more stuff I remember that I need to get rid of. I was happier when I wasn’t planning . . .

Books by Paul Hollywood

 

 

Holiday Day 4 – Decay, Declutter and Downsize

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We went into the garden this afternoon, sorting out the shed because we  have promised Number One Son some tools for his new house. It’s amazing what rubbish I have stored when I should really have binned it.

However, the first thing we noticed was that the guttering had come off the shed at one end. It’s been raining quite a lot and it has also ben quite blustery. The shed has started to rot a little in places and the screws at one end have pulled out. With no decent wood left to screw it into and, to be honest, no idea how to get a bracket off the gutter, I resorted to green garden wire and blue polypropylene string. It’s a very agricultural look, but it should hold it until the builders come to do the house gutters. If they ever come . . .

I have a hint for all homeowners. Move before 30 years in a property. We need a new back door and the gutter fixing (though other parts of the shed are showing their age too. The other shed, made out of wood that was less well prepared was taken down a few years ago.

As things stand, we will be taking a bag of hand tools with us, a bag of books, two household appliances and the last of his clothes. I reckon if we move this much each week it will only take us three or four years to clear the the house. It’s just a shame that we want to be out in less that 18 months, and that the shed will probably disintegrate before then, now it has started.

The photograph is part of my Sweetheart Brooch Collection – at the end of the war (1917 according to Wikipedia) the Army stated to issue overseas service chevrons – red for service in 1914 and blue for other years. The maximum that could be awarded was six – one red and five blue.  This would involve someone fighting through from 1914 to the end of the war in Russia in 1919 and I’m not sure how many people managed that. I’ve never seen a set of six, and never seen a set of five blue ones either. However, I digress.

These badges were meant for men to wear (the crescent fittings were meant to go through the buttonhole on a man’s jacket, and is a hybrid Sweetheart/Regimental Brooch.  It’s a subject area of its own and I have started a post on Sweethearts, as well as mentioning them before, so I may make sure I get down to finishing the half-complete post.

In the meantime, note how the two pieces seem to screw together, though I’m not quite sure how they manged it when you see how they fit. It was clearly a case of buying a badge and specifying the number of chevrons – a cunning marketing ploy. The Patent Date appears to be 1918 and the maker was TLM – Thomas L Mott, who made a lot of fine Victorian sweetheart brooches too. He also did loads of other jewellery, often using butterfly wing, as a quick search of his name will prove. Yes, butterfly wing – I shudder at the thought.

Wiltshire Regiment (Reverse)

Wiltshire Regiment (Front)

Downsizing, Decluttering and Döstädning

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All productive days need a list somewhere near the beginning. If not, you risk wandering off the point, lose motivation and, as I often do, become confused by the number of tasks. Once you are confused by the profusion of tasks it is hard to settle down and achieve anything.

Some things need to be done every day – replies to comments, checking emails, maybe looking at eBay (which is of varying importance, depending on what I am bidding on). Others don’t need doing, as they are just time-wasting habits of no importance.

It is now some time later . . .

I looked up soup recipes using tinned soup, which was something I had meant to do. Then I made the lunch, using one of the recipes. Well, part of one of the recipes. We are out of smoked paprika and the lentils would have taken too long to cook.  Then I had to take Julia to an appointment so, while I was out I nipped to the jewellery shop as I haven’t been for a while.

It’s now 4pm and the day is slightly slipping by, despite my mention of lists.  I am now going to spend another hour on tasks from the list and see how it turns out. I suspect it will be better than some of my recent days.

In the last post I said “research some articles, write some bits for the Numismatic Society Facebook page and knock some submissions into shape.”

I’ve done a bit of research and polished a poem. So far, apart from the soup, they are the only actual list-type things I’ve done. I’ve also found a specialist book dealer who may buy some of my books. I need to downsize and if I can make  few shillings at the same time it will be good.

I’m going to start calling it döstädning, which is Swedish for Death Cleaning. Actually, I might just call it Swedish Death Cleaning, there are a lot of umlauts in there now I come to look at it again.

Ah! I’ve just come up with a new title . . .

The Second Morning of the Rest of My Life

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After yesterday’s energetic start I faded. The afternoon was OK but the evening tailed off and I fell asleep in front of the TV, woke up, flicked through three old writing magazines from 2002 (decluttering throws up some strange finds) and went to bed. I was, I admit, resigned to the fact that I was likely to face anti-climax in the morning.

I was amazed to find myself almost leaping from bed this morning when the alarm went off. I’ve dropped Julia at work, abused a few drivers and had an interesting time with the shredder already this morning. The COVID testing station at the County Council offices is, as usual, well lit and well staffed by people wearing high-vis jackets and masks. All they need is somebody to test.

The shredder is a large and impressive shiny plastic box. I have inherited it from my father. It seems right and proper that shiny mechanical things should pass down the male line, particularly as we threw the box away and I am operating it without instructions. Wives all over WordPress are nodding wisely not and saying “Yes, shiny mechanical things with sharp blades and no instructions have been a feature of married life for many years.”

Let’s face it, most instruction books could be reduced to two points –

(1) Switch on.

(2) Do what you like. We know you aren’t going to read past here. Even if you got this far.

I normally stop reading after ‘on’.

Last week I used the shredder. Julia had left me with a pile of documents and instructions that the shredder would probably need emptying at some point. What she actually meant was that it was full and needed emptying.

I wondered why it had two lights when one would be enough. Seems the second one was telling me to stop because it was full. You’d think they’s make it more obvious. Anyway, as long as it kept cutting, I kept feeding stuff in and the light kept blinking.

Then it stopped.

Even I can tell that means it’s probably full. At that point I found that I didn’t know how to empty it. Despite repeatedly pulling at anything that looked vaguely pullable nothing gave so I rang my sister, who told me what to do. It didn’t work. I waited for Julia to show me after I collected her from work. Nothing.

Eventually we opened a drawer slightly and Julia, having smaller hands than me, was able to scoop some of the shredded paper out, which eventually allowed us to free the drawer and empty the rest. This is a cross-cut shredder so the paper debris is not all ravelled up in a big ball, but cut into tiny migratory pieces. I’m still finding them on the floor.five days later.

Today I have started it and jammed it. There was, it seems, a piece of paper stuck in front of the sensor that tells it that it is full. I found that piece of paper after removing several dozen others.

I’m now ready to take another leap into the unknown and see what other interesting adventures occur when I start shredding again. You’d have thought, by 2020, having sent men to the Moon and built a Space Station, that we’d be able to design a shredder that actually works for longer than twenty minutes at a time.

My sister has sent me some oiled sheets you use occasionally to clean the blades. I’d never heard of them until last week. I can’t wait to see what areas of disaster open up as I feed one of them through.

It’s just turned 10.00 so it’s not been a bad start – all that and 600+ words. At this rate I’m in danger of actually achieving something.

 

The First Morning of the Rest of My Life

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I think we’ve finally made the breakthrough in decluttering. It’s cost us many arguments, the serious erosion of my book mountain and, in my case, a very stiff back, but yesterday I could finally see it was beginning to look clear rather than simply redistributed, and I felt free. Well, freeish. There’s still a lot to do, but we are getting there. Even moving the car insurance is part of the new life. At one time I would have paid the exhorbitant rise simply because I don’t like change.

For those of you who noticed it, I’ll go back to my spelling of exhorbitant in a later post.

Today I dropped Julia off at work and went shopping in Lidl. I normally go to Aldi (the other budget German supermarket) but I thought I’d give a recently opened branch of Lidl the once-over. I needed a loaf of sliced bread. Bear that in mind as I describe my shopping technique.

My first stop was the bakery, where I selected four croissants for tomorrow’s breakfast, because they looked inviting. I bought two pain au chocolat because Julia likes them, a sourdough boule, a , some cobs for a sandwiches over the next couple of days, and, finally, a brown sliced loaf. I( sound very middle-class, don’t I? Apart from the fact that Lidl isn’t the natural home of the middle-classes.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d stopped there, but I added sea bass (I hate fish but Julia loves it, and I’m still trying to make up for the lack of birthday presents, which are still in the post somewhere). Plus ham trimmings (which are a good, cheap sandwich filling), chocolates (see previous comment regarding birthday presents), butter (necessary for the sea bass), paracetamol (just in case of shortage) and some quinoa in microwavable pouches. Yep, definitely middle class…

I doubt I’ll go back. It was a poor shopping experience, despite the bakery. Too many customers with no masks, bossy checkout operator with no mask and a bad attitude, poor stock levels and obstruction of the aisles by staff.

I’ve also decluttered, written, drunk a bottle of Lucozade and filled the shredder, though I have stopped it before jamming it this time.

All in all, it’s not a bad morning, though I’m now starting to wonder if my new found energy is down to the psychological boost of decluttering or the 45g of sugar that the Lucozade label tells me I’ve just consumed. That’s 11 teaspoons according to the internet. Oh dear…

Speckled Wood