And good luck with the spring cleaning

I have come to grips with one of the great verities of life. It is that your desire to get rid of detritus collected over the years at home, deliberately or inadvertently, grows in inverse proportion to the intention of doing away with it. Like Topsy from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I think it just ‘grow’d.’ I use the word detritus somewhat loosely. When you have lived for well nigh seven decades and a bit, all kinds of things tend to accumulate. Not really detritus, but possibly timed-out. At the time, they are considered precious and indispensable. Having salted them away, you have barely had the time to revisit the cache. They are kept carefully in shoe boxes, biscuit tins, dark corners in cupboards and drawers, secreted away in suitcases caked with grime and dust, that have not seen the light of day since Noah’s Ark opened its doors to its varied paired fauna. Times without number you have said to yourself, and to your wife, ‘I must get down to do some serious spring cleaning. There’s just too much stuff lying around taking up space.’ The sardonic laugh is from the wife, who herself has much to think about when it comes to cleaning out her invaluable collectibles.

With that pious thought and fully aware that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, I start attempting to sort out the various accumulated articles and knick-knacks. This is how they stack up, category-wise, and I spend more time thinking about what to do with them than in actuality accomplishing anything in the way of discarding them.

Books. There are now so many books around the house, literally bursting out of every nook and cranny. Our staircase to the terrace could be in danger. Let me get cracking. The local lending library will be pleased to get a trunkful of these books. Let’s see. There are 61 novels of P.G. Wodehouse. Can’t touch them. I would rather commit hara-kiri than part with any of Plum’s masterpieces. As far as I am concerned, they are all masterpieces. I must admit many of the Jeeves / Wooster and Blandings Castle escapades are coming apart at the seams, the white-ants have got to them, but I am damned if I am giving any of them away.

What’s this? The Golden Treasury of Longer Poems, presented to S. Suresh, winner of the school elocution contest 1963. You see what I mean? Then there’s Amis, Kingsley and Martin, Spike Milligan, The Complete Works of Italian crime writer, Andrea Camilleri, Christopher Hitchens, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, some old Perry Masons, Louis L’Amours and Agatha Christies, learned volumes from my advertising days and so much more. Not to mention books written by my friends and relatives (everybody is publishing books these days). Tell you what, all the fat Encyclopaedias can go for a start, ditto voluminous autobiographies (they are so full of themselves), don’t need so many Wisdens (I can get all the cricket statistics from Google). That should be a decent start for clearing up. I can review the situation a year down the road.

Lest I forget, there is an Eng. Lit. topper at home, namely, my better half whose books occupy several shelves. From Austen and Bronte to Camus and Turgenev, Dumas to Dickens and Eliot – George and T.S. to Mann and Salinger. And that is barely skimming the surface. Shakespeare’s Complete Works is not a space saver either. Can’t touch any of them. And here’s a laugh. I too have published books comprising a compilation of my pieces. Since no one buys them, barring a handful of diehard loyalists, I purchase boxfuls of them at volume discounts and periodically gift them to unwary friends and visitors to our wee home (you are duly cautioned). Those boxes take up space as well.

Finally, the airport pot-boilers for flights. Follet, Baldacci, Cook, Clancy, Francis – you get the drift. From the sublime to the ridiculous, there’s also a stack of comics and Mad magazines to deal with. Net result, after spending over two hours, I have managed to cull out a measly 17 books to dispose of. If I must buy a book in the interim, it will have to be Kindle or some such. More’s the pity.

Compact Discs & DVDs. Music and all manner of film entertainment is a passion with me. Having graduated from vinyls, spool tapes and cassette tapes, VHS tapes and finally CDs and DVDs, I felt I had reached the apogee of technology delivering hi-definition music and drama for home entertainment. Then came the audio and video streaming devices delivering the best of music and films the world had to offer, rendering all my CDs and DVDs redundant overnight. I am now sitting on a mountain of over 700 CDs and DVDs of some of the best and brightest, not knowing what to do with them. Barring a handful of titles, pretty much all of them are streaming on Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, Apple and several other channels. It breaks my heart to throw them all away as the market for same is worse than bearish, and every time I pick up a CD of Bob Dylan or Joan Baez or the Fawlty Towers DVD box-set, I hastily slot them back into the shelf. It’s a good job I stopped buying CDs over five years ago. Incidentally, my CD player went on the blink recently, and there’s no one to repair it. This is a quandary I will have to live with. Does not help the space problem, but that is my problem.

Letters. No one writes letters these days, not for the past 15 years, give or take. I mean with a pen on sheets of paper. It’s all on email or junk mail. However, things were different way back when. Postcards, picture postcards, inland letters, bulky letters arriving in buff envelopes, starting from school friends writing in during holidays, parents writing to us when we were incarcerated in boarding school, pen pals, letters from across the seas and so much more. Because of the effort and trouble taken to sit down and write these letters, we could never throw them away. They are all there in various boxes. It is now time to take stock as you may not want these personal missives to be lying around when you are no longer amongst those present. But when you get down to re-reading them in order to start tearing them up, nostalgia claims you for its own and instead, you start tearing up! In the words of the Bard, ‘letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would,” like the poor cat i’ the adage.’

Miscellany. If books and music have the capacity to give us everlasting pleasure, I am not sure of some of the gewgaws that seem to find their way into every available space around the home. A weathered Cotswold stone from somewhere in those picture-perfect Cotswold villages, some sea shells and pebbles from a beach in the Costa Brava (I have seen more shells on the Marina Beach in Madras), a withered feather from I know not where that serves as a bookmark, theatre and cinema tickets (The Absent-Minded Professor, The Minerva, Calcutta), bus and train tickets from all parts of the globe, even a 20p tram ticket from Calcutta (the no.24 that ferried me to college at the crack of dawn), my late Cocker Spaniel’s dog collar and identity badge – there’s no end to it. Photographs, tons of them. Need to get them digitized. Soon as I put this article to bed, I will be slapping my forehead exclaiming, ‘Gosh, I forgot to include Christmas and New Year greeting cards with all those twee messages, two large-size envelopes full of them. And like letters, greeting cards are also now an almost extinct species what with all the moving images we can conjure from the internet.

In conclusion, I guess what I am striving to communicate is that we humans are inveterate collectors of things. Any ‘things.’ Trying to get rid of them is a mug’s game. It’s over four years since I last examined my hidden treasures. One of these days I will get down to it, but the result will be the same. I will come over all misty-eyed and put them all back. Someone called Josie Brown is credited with saying, ‘The key to spring cleaning is to be ruthless. Throw out anything and everything you never use.’ Sooner you than me, Josie, sooner you than me.