I HAVE learned two valuable lessons from our impending house-move extravaganza – one of which, of course, is never to do it again. The other seems less profound, yet it will undoubtedly have far-reaching consequences on our future lifestyle.
We found this nugget of wisdom deep in the recesses of a dimly-lit walk-in cupboard my wife and I had been clearing out for the best part of three hours.
I was holding a Jiffy bag full of assorted strands of string while my wife grappled with a cardboard box full of old Christmas cards.
We looked at one another in the gloom, sweating like desperados digging their way to freedom, the rubbish we had cleared building up behind us into a new prison wall.
“You know something?” said my wife with world-weary resignation. But I knew what she was about to say. “Nothing comes in handy.”
“I know, it’s sad but true,” I reflected in agreement. “Not even old bits of string.”
“Or a Christmas card someone sent us 12 years ago,” said my wife.
I wasn’t so sure about that one. “Didn’t Blue Peter turn old Christmas cards into something useful, if not downright handy?” I asked.
“Probably . . . in 1967,” said my wife, and threw the box over her shoulder.
Several big Valentine cards slid out of the box and we both made an instinctive move for them, but then thought better of it.
At some point during the cathartic process of emptying the contents of our house, we had changed our hoarding ways.
I was, however, excited by the nest of brightly-coloured plastic egg cups I had uncovered. Since we had never seen them before, we concluded that a previous occupant had probably left a couple by mistake and over the years they had bred into what could only be described as a colony.
“Now these would be handy if we had a B&B,” I said, and then sniffed one so my wife could screw up her face in disgust.
“Faintly eggy,” was my expert conclusion.
Throwing the egg cups away was tough. They looked so jolly and so incredibly handy, if not actually useful, but if we had kept them the yoke would have been on us.
This propensity for hoarding rubbish because one day it might come in handy seems to be encrypted in our genes. It’s certainly in our nature, being the offspring of professional hoarders who were trained during the austerity of the 1930s. This prepared them for the rigours of World War II, during which their skills for stockpiling complete rubbish achieved new “handy” heights.
Both our mothers had a drawer in their kitchens that was full of folded and flattened paper bags, and both our fathers had jars and tins full of rusty, twisted screws and bolts. Until last week, I, too, had several large collections of old nuts and bolts, some of which have been passed down as family treasures. My large box of broken electrical plugs would be of particular interest to the British Science Museum. In fact, it would make an excellent companion piece to my collection of dubious fuses and odd lengths of flex.
In the cupboard, I had found a knot of what I thought was electrical and television leads under the egg cup nest, but it turned out be a tangle of horrible ties and belts without buckles. Lifted clear of the cupboard, I had to hold them at arm’s length once I realised it wasn’t a hat sitting on top of them but a pie crust of dust.
“Well, these aren’t mine,” I said, trying not to breathe in.
My wife looked at them for a moment and then leaped back with a shriek.
“Aagh, it’s moving,” she shouted, so I dropped the lot and we ran for it.
“Probably not one for the charity-shop bag,” I said, peeking into the room as my wife shuddered in the hallway.
I was getting fed up with visiting the local charity shop. After a dozen or so visits, I had become a regular fixture and the old ladies had stopped sexually harassing me. The first time I turned up it was all “Oh, hello, sexy” and “here’s a new boyfriend for you, Cathy”. I was lady-handled by women who thought I was a GI on leave.
At one point, I began to wonder if I was going to get out alive with my storage crates intact. Then they started fighting over my deliveries, looking for “racy” books, and eventually I was told just to dump everything through the back. Such is the fickle world of the charity-shop romance.
I was fairly certain that a lot of the stuff we gave them didn’t belong to us in the first place, anyway: the hand-held electric massager, unused in its box, was a startling revelation to which neither of us would own up.
Mystery also surrounded the four immaculate suitcases from the loft that contained the contents of a mini-gym, a pink hand-held sewing machine and an unmade model of a hovercraft.
There were times over the past few weeks when it looked like Tony Robinson and his Time Team were going to show up. The banana-coloured leather jacket with its rounded lapels I had bought in Amsterdam was a case in point. Just to test its inherent handiness, my wife and I took turns trying it on and both of us looked like porn-movie directors from 1975.
On my final trip to the recycling centre, the umpteenth black bag packed with so-called handy stuff took an awful revenge on me. As I heaved it from the car boot it caught a metal knob and split itself open as I yanked it free.
A choice selection of cherished rubbish exposed itself to the public.
Considering the state of it I wasn’t surprised no one rushed to my aid. One woman with comedy teeth passed by holding a dainty little rubbish bag and, eyeing up the plastic egg cups, said: “Ooh. they look handy.”
Little did she know.