Packing while moving house. We love it. Sample conversation with my mum, knee deep in packing tissues and cardboard boxes:

Me: Oh, what’s this long thin piece of material I’ve just found tucked away in a box in the attic?
Mum: That’s the hem off those curtains we used to have in the spare room in St Quintin Avenue, you know the ones - they were a bit too long so I had to take them up.
Me: Oh right. Where are the curtains then?
Mum: Goodness knows. No idea. I think we gave them away when we moved from that house, must have been 84…85 maybe…?
Me: Right then. Can I throw this hem away too?
Mum: Certainly not! You never know when it might come in handy.
Me: [incredulous, vein throbbing in temple] For WHAT?!

Sigh. Lots of conversations like that.

My mum is fundamentally a hoarder of the first order. While poking about on top of the welsh dresser we found a weaver-bird’s nest that she had brought back from Sri Lanka. In 1982.

I, while freely admitting to having a lot of crap, have no qualms about getting rid of things when I move, and can in fact give bagloads of stuff to charity/the binmen withough compunction. The process of flinging out old letters (love letters especially) of a few weeks ago was surprisingly cathartic - made it much easier to think about new life, the future.

My mum, however, while not hanging on to love letters, is definitely hanging on to other stuff - theatre programmes from every play she’s ever been to (and considering that in the early sixties she worked at the Nottingham playhouse, that’s a lot), shoes worn twice fifteen years ago and not since, because they were so uncomfortable, a tea-towel that once got too close to the grill and ended up singed, but has a yummy recipe for gingerbread men on it, a stack of Home and Garden magazines from the mid eighties, because “one of them has a good article in it”
(Me: “About what?”
Mum: “I can’t remember”
Me: “Which one is it in?”
Mum: “I’m not sure”
Me: [beating my head against the door jamb until brain tissue leaks out of my ears]).

I give up. There’s no hope for her.

Makes me want to come back to London and fling everything away, though. I’d never condone arson, but I can certainly see the appeal of starting with a tabula rasa, without needing to make a conscious choice about it. Liberating yourself from the shackles of stuff…