A friend of mine purchased a farmhouse and plot of land from the heirs of a couple who had lived there for almost 70 years. In the accompanying barn was stored all the things that this couple could not throw away, neatly organized, tied, boxed and stacked. There were dozens of boxes of pencil stubs, all worn down to a uniform length of about 1 inch. There were dozens of balls of mixed twine and string. Boxes of rubber bands and others containing bottle caps. And in a couple of boxes, neatly (lovingly?) wrapped in tissue paper, were the mummified remains of cats – former family pets, perhaps? Upon their discovery, my friend abandoned the barn cleanup to her husband and a hired worker.
I've been trying to sell my apartment for about three years now; its problem is that it's too expensive for the casual, second-homer, but not expensive enough to attract the real rich, who have been dumping sterling in favour of property around and preferably over the million euro mark, since the Brexit nonsense came along to threaten fiscal security and international opinion regarding the reliability of Britain as a place in which to invest and save.
The point is this: I have boxes of straightened nails, screws; bags of wine bottle corks. I have complete sets of car spanners for a variety of standard types of bolts - who messes with a car's inners today? Who can do anything with them anymore when they are all hidden? I have a chainsaw from my days gathering branches and making logs for the sitting room stove; I have an electrical hedge trimmer that I used to use when I felt the official gardeners had been a little tardy in coming around... none of those things have been used in almost ten years, and if I eventually move rather than die first, probably never will be used by me again. I have a large box of 35mm transparency sleeves - DW Viewpacks, anyone? A Schneider loupe sits beside my aluminium stacking case, getting in the way every time I want to pull out a Nikon. My Kodak lightbox sits atop the filing cabinet serving, now and again, as a white background to Ms Coke. Old copies of French
PHOTO and photography books clutter space in the cabinet on which sits the tv, as on the shelf which I expect will fall off the wall one day and take out my letter printer and computers and monitor. Oh - I also keep the defunct HP B 9180 that I hope will, miraculously, spring to life again one day. Boxes full of A3+ prints in archival sleeves... who in hell was I kidding? I even have a perfectly working studio monobloc from the 70s!
Why? Because of the unpredictability of life: all too often have I screwed up the moral fortitude to dump something, to discover, a week later, that it was exactly what I needed in order to solve a new problem.
Should Mr & Mrs Buyer come along, I would have to hire a skip and resist the temptation of jumping in beside all the junk too.
There is ever a sound reason behind hoarding. I hope!
