July 12

I am a bit like a dog trying to make itself comfortable.  I walk round and round my 'bed' in circles before deciding it is good enough to sleep on.  I do this by tidying up.  Our one great failure as a family is clutter.  I don't know how it happens, but we seem to end up with these piles everywhere.  A pile of books, a pile of clothes, a pile of piles. The piles usually stay where they are during the school term and then, on the first day of the holidays, I blitz them.

I walk around the house with a pile of things, saying, 'whose is this?' and 'whose is this?' and 'put this away, please.' Everyone hates me while I do this, although they ultimately benefit from a happier me once I have settled down and am content with my environment.

I've read all about clutter and what it represents - all those things you have to come to terms with in your life - and I don't want it anymore.  I would be content to be a minimalist.  At the beginning of the lockdown, we did a big clear out and it was just such a wonderful feeling to get rid of a lot of things we didn't need or want anymore.  

However, whilst I am quite good at throwing rubbish away and the girls are not bad, John is hopeless.  A typical man, he sees a use for everything - that screw found behind the fridge covered in fur, that broken towel rail, that piece of string lying in the bottom of a drawer ('It is a very good piece of string.  They don't make string like this anymore.  It will come in useful should we ever need five centimetres of string in a hurry.').

I had put on top of the SPCA shop pile, a tape.  It is a copy of Aha's Greatest Hits or something along those lines.  Someone made it for John in 1984.  We no longer have a means of playing tapes and I am sure it would be easier to download the album from the Internet than try and convert this to digital or whatever people do with old tapes. 

I deliberately don't ask John if I can give it away or not because I know what the answer will be.  He won't miss it or look for it.  He won't even think about it if I just quietly give it away. If I ask him, it will become his most prized possession in the world and one that he would struggle to exist without. It is a mistake, of course, to leave the tape on top of the pile for the next time I look, it has gone and I can only assume it is back in a corner somewhere, beginning a new pile.