Life Laundry

Prompted by the horrified realisation that I was turning into my mother in terms of showing hoarding tendencies, (she has the excuse of coming from a generation where you never threw anything away because a) things could be fixed rather than just replaced back then and b) even if something was knackered beyond repair, it could always be pressed into service as part of a barricade against any Nazi invasion) I decided to get rid of some of my stuff, or ‘junk’ as my wife more accurately if somewhat cruelly describes it.

This was prompted not just by the fear of turning into my Mother in terms of hoarding, but the very real possibility of turning into one of those mad old men who start off hoarding magazine collections that week by week build into a treasury of tat that you’ll treasure forever as it collects dust under your bed. Free binder with part two. Then you start hoarding all newspapers. Then before you know it you’re crapping in a plastic bag and hiding it in a cupboard to keep it safe from the Government.

My extensive video collection sat dust covered and neglected. It wasn’t just that my VCR had started playing up about three years ago and I had never bothered fixing or replacing it, nor was it that I was fickle enough to have transferred my attention first to DVDs, then to the internet (video is okay, DVD is better, youtube is hysterical but nothing, and I mean nothing, tops some desperate presenter on BidUp TV whoring himself live on telly trying to persuade you to buy towels and seeing that they have ten thousand of in stock, sit back, ‘phone your friends and start making bets on when his perspiration and desperation will become visible), it was just I had better things to do. Nintendo mainly.

One thing is for sure, anyone going into the local Oxfam will have one hell of an opportunity to get themselves a world class cinematic education on a budget. No longer will they have to feel slightly inferior because they have not seen classic movies. Even better, I was able to group them by genre.

This proved to be a little bit disturbing. There was a hell of a lot of action movies, with Arnie and Bruce very well represented. This is odd, as I always thought that I was a sensitive little soul, but based on the evidence of my movie tastes, my sensitivity extended to thinking it uncouth if a villain was dispatched without a pithy one-liner.

There’s a book by Umberto Eco about a guy who, after losing his memory, returns to his childhood home to re-read all of the books he consumed growing up. The idea is that it will trigger memory recovery but what the guy is actually trying to do is reconstruct himself from this literature. This is something I’ve often considered, and wondered about its effect, but what the book made me realise is that the character had the realisation that he was just as much a product of what he had read as what he had done. This is more than true in my case as I shamelessly plagiarise anything that might make me sound more witty or important than I actually am. So God alone knows what I would have been like if I had tried to reconstruct my character from my video collection – probably that special 80’s action combination of camp and butch and always ready with a one liner and a rocket launcher.

Obviously, there were some videos that I just could not part with. Video diaries from ten years ago, from the Hay literature festival, from the Edinburgh festival and from Sidmouth Folk Festival, back in the days where my mate owned a broadcast quality video camera and I had a jacket and tie and a microphone and you could get away with just about anything. Also, the Star Wars Trilogy that was bought for me for my 21st. Two reasons to keep this, sentimental value and because they prove, like incriminating CCTV footage, that HAN SHOT FIRST DAMMIT! Oh, and my wedding video.

A moving experience

I’ve been helping my mother move house. This mostly consists of my being by turns grumpy, sweaty, sulky and hysterical while my mother organises everything, like a cross between a ringmaster and a cowboy herding sheep.

We were leaving the home that I had lived in for a few teenage years before buggering off for a life of not so gainful employment with a brief but deeply shit career in the private sector so while weekends at home were fun, I did used to rather dread the prospect of work on a Monday. Hence the house held mixed memories and I wasn’t sorry to leave. I did wonder about Mum though, and had nightmare visions about having to pry her fingers off the door, like Thatcher leaving Downing Street (you just know that they had to get rid of the carpets because of her claw marks in them).

Not a bit of it, close door, in car, off to estate agents, not a backwards look or remark.

This was good, because by then my condition could have been described as ‘frazzled’. Mum had been packing for weeks, months even but, Jesus, so much stuff! We had got through all the proper boxes and the big boxes and were slowly having to use smaller and smaller boxes, it was like packing up Russian dolls.

Thankfully, years of playing Tetris paid off and I was able to fill the back of my hire car to the roof with loads of stuff in boxes. This was in addition to the loads of stuff I had taken to the tip.

And that was in addition to the stuff that I had taken to the tip on previous occasions, which was a lot. If the local tip had some sort of loyalty scheme, I’d probably have a skip named after me by now.

Once at the new house, we unpacked all the stuff we had packed. Two things occurred to me, the first was that I could really, really get to hate the smell of cardboard and the second was that nobody, with the exception of the owner of a furniture warehouse, needs that many side-tables. My mother has more side tables than places to put them. The laws of geometry and physics have been bent to allow he to have all her side tables in one room – it’s no coincidence that the large haydron collider went bust, its entire power output is being used to distort my mums front room into ten dimensional space to allow her to display her vast collection of nick-knacks on her side tables.

My melt-down moment came when I discovered that I had packed, transported and unpacked some red and amber glass rock things that are used as part of a flame effect for an electric fire. An electric fire which my mother no longer owns.

My melt-down did not manifest itself in the usual rant. More worryingly, it took the form of a cold and shocking realisation that I. was. Exactly. The. Same.

I helped settle Mum in her new home (realised that I liked it more than the old place) and, a couple of days later, came home and got busy.

First thing to go – my video collection. Hundreds of video tapes. Films and programmes. Thousands of hours of entertainment. This was my entertainment bank, compiled as a young man when I was pretty sure that the rest of my adult life would consist of me living alone with nothing much to do except watch my favourite movies. This was my weapon against boredom.

Three things happened; the invention of the internet, Nintendo and getting married. Believe me, the concept of being bored has not existed for me since about 1998 when the slightest sign of it is met with the perky yet dread enquiry ‘want to chat about our relationship?’.

Anyway, who’s got time to be bored? There’s freeview, digital radio, there’s Mario and Resident Evil, there’s all the stuff on the internet. Bored, alone? Spend a guilty three minutes watching surprising filth and then an hour disinfecting your hard drive, clearing your browser history and showering the guilt off.