Cherish or chuck?

Posted by Barbara on February 5, 2024 in Blog, Humour, Living today | 2 comments

Do you retain or recycle? Hoard or hurl everything possible into the bin? Cherish or chuck? Just why is it that half the population keeps everything that comes their way and the other half gets rid of it as soon as humanly possible? I confess that these percentages are only approximate, so please don’t tell Tim Harford, he of the More or Less programme on Radio 4, where he and his cohorts have fun debunking the sort of easily available stats on topics that abound and are often incorrect.

Whatever the precise figures, I belong to the tribe that revels in getting rid of things I don’t use, don’t want and resent the space they are occupying in my home.  I admit this is hard when it comes to books; I almost never re-read a book, yet enjoy the sight of a well-stocked bookshelf, replete with elegant spines and enticing titles. However, we have literally run out of space on these shelves, so that for every new book I buy or am given, the only way to accommodate it is to say a fond farewell to one of its predecessors.

If I lived in a mansion, I would happily have a library, but I don’t, so I can’t.  The trouble is that I do have many more books in a cupboard in my home office.  These include publications with which I have been involved in a work capacity – which I have no intention of throwing away, as they are a reminder of a time when I was, hopefully, adding to a vast body of knowledge that might still be relevant.

Less easy to justify are the very large number of dictionaries and language grammars.  These represent my years of language study and the files and notebooks I filled at the time.  They pose extremely tricky existential questions: am I going to take up the study of Japanese again, and if not, why not? And if not, why the heck am I keeping ‘Japanese for Busy People’? Unfortunately, this leads to soul searching study regarding my level of busyness. Too much or, horror of horrors, too little? The book has been placed quickly back on the shelf as this level of introspection is becoming a bit disturbing.

Moving swiftly on, I feel on safer ground with the household files.  I’m fine with the solicitor’s documents from the house purchase, but is a 10-year-old water bill of any use, particularly as all of this stuff is now online? Fortunately the shredder is under the desk. Bye bye ageing water bill, council tax bill and the results of the last mammogram but one. I mean, it stands to reason that if…you get my drift.

I’m on the home stretch now.  I no longer care how much that little garden shed cost 10 years ago, in fact I’d be better off not knowing.  It may well need replacing in a few years, and by that time the cost of living will presumably have tripled, so to avoid a serious depression I won’t want to be making any sort of comparison between current prices and those of 15 years ago.

Gosh, the shredder’s full already.  That was easy.