Chucking Out Time

A fever seems to be raging as Freshers’ Week kicks off and all the children are finally in school. On every street it seems family saloons are being crammed with bulging cardboard boxes, household linens, broken Dysons and trips to the charity shops and the local dump are on everybody’s schedule.

I’m not immune. Perhaps more than in spring, the clear out beckons. Low beams of dazzling autumn sun make it impossible to ignore the encroachment of hoarded tat, threadbare spots on the carpet, grubby finger marks on painted surfaces.

And, inexorably, Christmas is coming, hand in hand with its incipient anxiety. Not just the exhortation to get more stuff, get more stuff, but just where will we put all the stuff when we get it? Where will we even put the bloody tree?

In our cellar, hands on hips, I stand on the periphery of our accumulation of children’s outgrown toys, DIY paraphernalia, towering piles of discarded boxes, teetering stacks of furniture, and I have to steel myself against the wave of despair that threatens to send me running back up the stairs.

Sternly I rein in my panic and tell myself: “Look. For. Stuff. To. Sell.” I know it has to be here somewhere. The spare chairs, the uncomfortable settee, the impulse purchases from IKEA, the things yet unpacked from our move four years ago - they will do for a start. But as I examine some of them and wonder how I will faithfully describe them to potential buyers, I can’t help thinking I need a new word: ‘family-worn’.

Such a term covers felt-tip pen marks that won’t quite come out, the faded flaws created by a vigorous treatment of Vanish to remove said pen marks, the scratches of an impatient dog, a previous owner’s cat, the scurf of glitter, dust and puckered, gum-less stickers that seems to reappear magically within ten minutes of being vacuumed, the graffiti and the Disney stickers that, without a bottle of white spirit, are definitely here to stay.

Mmmm. How to spin it? Shabby Chic? Good upholstery project? Another term I wish I could use springs to mind – how Japanese women refer to their newly retired husbands getting under their feet: sodai gomi (oversize rubbish – see, it sounds better in Japanese).

I am then struck by a mortal fear: what if I do sell these for a few quid, or donate them, in a few weeks’ time? I could witness them re-upholstered, poised in their designer-distressed distinction in the window of one of the chi-chi boutiques of Lewes, bearing a price tag that will make me simultaneously laugh and weep.

So, there they stay for now.

I start small. The bags and bags of plastic bags, the used margarine/ice cream tubs  - proof that the 21^st Century Green ethos of Reduce, Re-use, Recycle is the perfect storm for producing a generation of hoarders on the scale of Edmund Trebus.

I feel cheated of the spate of guilt free ‘de-cluttering’ that accompanied the Blair era. ‘How to de-Clutter’ books and Life Coaches seemed to promise that an empty attic was the key to enlightenment. And what a joyful antidote that was to my parents’ post war penny-pinching (the quarter of a tomato in the fridge, the broken teacups full of dripping, the bags of old tights for tying up the beans).

Their legacy is that I still feel sick with shame when I throw food away.  But, perhaps I should.

Nevertheless, I await with interest the day that my son regards his ice cream carton lunchbox with horror and demands its replacement with something China-made and embellished with super-heroes.

It depresses me to consign all those polypropylene (PP) containers to the bin.  Alongside PET, it is one of the most commonly used household plastics, used as DVD cases, soup pots and, of course, margarine tubs.  They are potentially, recyclable, of course, but according to the BBC there won’t be household collections for another five years. Not even I can contemplate collecting a garrison of PP containers until recycling facilities are available. But then again, if I move aside those old oil cans…