STUFF Part I

We are thinking about the forthcoming move from Our House and the thought sends us all into spirals of despair. What on earth are we going to do with all those jars of chutney? I wail. Frankly darling, Bloggiana points out tartly, that’s the least of our worries.

And indeed, the old girl could have a point. Over the years, Bloggiana and I and Bloggiana’s daughter have hoarded considerably. There are collections of plastic spoons. There are small piles of egg-boxes and large piles of egg-boxes and strings of paper clips and bags full of bags. Every give-away air travel set has been kept. Every postcard half-written and not posted has been popped into a drawer somewhere. Every pair of laddered tights, every almost-finished battery, every bent screw has managed to hang on, unthreatened even remotely by eviction on our part.

In the hallway, there are stacks of magazines we read once and enjoyed. In the dining room, in the drawer of the sideboard, there are some brown paper labels which Bloggiana’s mother’s mother had put to one side, meaning to write them up but somehow never managing. On the staircase, in a drawer of a whatnot, are unopened packets of hairnets – three for a shilling. In Bloggiana’s bedroom, in the bedside cabinet, is a pile of horsehair which her father’s friend’s father’s groom cut from his favourite hunter, just in case Bloggiana’s mother’s rocking-horse ever needed to thicken out its tail.

Aware of the enormity of the task in prospect, we decide we will start on the great clearout months in advance. Bloggiana opens a drawer in the kitchen and, confronted by a pile of chutney labels for a batch made in 1999, some half-used birthday candles and three empty but commemorative books of matches, she bursts into tears. I go to the next drawer thinking I will have more success but all I can see are spoons we ate from when we were children and spoons we ate from when we went to that Bond movie and spoons we loved tucking down the side of the back seat of our old Austin Allegro and spoons that we just had known and loved forever.

Bloggiana’s daughter joins the fray. She opens the next drawer and finds a lot of corks. At the front, the corks are made of plastic or that kind of earwax-looking stuff that they seem to use nowadays. But if you move back through the corks, you can trace the history of our drinking life. Corks become reedier and Frencher and corkier. There are pre-cutback corks and pre-divorce corks. There are happily married corks and grand cru corks (from the days when we could afford such nectar) and christening corks and even, dare I say it, wedding corks. Twenty years of corks there are.

Bloggiana’s daughter looks at us out of the side of her giraffe-length eyelashes. She is fairly certain that opening the cork drawer has not helped. That didn’t help, did it? she says small-ly. Bloggiana and I have already slumped down onto the floor and are staring dolefully at our dirty finger-nails. This move is going to be a tad tricky, we think, telepathically. Out loud Bloggiana says No my sainted one, it certainly bloody did not.