Saturday

In an attempt to keep The Dog from doing any further damage to her injured foot we gave ourselves a quiet day today. Short walks on even ground so she wouldn’t stub her toe too often as the joint she dislocated yesterday recovered. She’s doing OK but she still won’t let me look at the sore foot. But she knows we’re worried about her and doesn’t try to bite my face off if I touch it. It doesn’t seem to be noticeably swollen but it’s obviously, and understandably,  tender. She slept while we busied ourselves with sorting through the stuff that we’d brought home from our parents’ homes. We got a room cleared and now have a table we can sit and eat at. We also have a clear route through the conservatory to the back door that doesn’t involve climbing past a pile of boxes. We both feel much better. In spite of it being the worst day of the year so far for my hay-fever it can go down as a good mental health day.

Another reason for the boost to mental health was a video essay from Jesper Kjærgaard. His YouTube channel is a favourite because he has the same desire that I do to make use of material that most other people would consign to the firewood pile. His channel is also a favourite because he doesn’t hide his struggles with mental health. In this essay Jesper talks about the loss of his father and the process of dealing with his vast collection of accumulated Stuff.

It resonated strongly with me. I’ve been busying myself with sorting through Lesley’s dad’s Stuff. It’s easier than dealing with Mum’s as there’s more emotional distance between me and the artifacts I’m handling and, 99% of the time, ripping up and throwing away.

There have been occasional treasures. I know enough about the significant events and places in Lesley’s life to recognise what would be important for her to see. But mostly it’s been a sequence of Why On Earth Has He Kept That!? moments.

Among the treasures was a package that seemed to have come from a clippings service. It was a bundle of magazine articles about marbling and graining. After the Second War when money was tight and good quality building materials were hard to get hold of it was very common for people to get painters to fake items to look like expensive marble or exotic wood. I had no idea how common until he told me what could be done years ago. After that it  seemed like every stately home or church or council office I went into had huge panels or columns that had been painted to look like marble or doors and furniture where the grain had been painted over cheap wood. Before Lesley was born he’d made a decent living doing work like this and he’d saved or bought a collection of articles detailing the minutiae of the technique. And they were pristine in spite being from the late 1940s and early 1950s. I got the feeling that once he’d opened the packet to see what they were the cuttings had never been looked at.

I got the same feeling for a set of booklets from Dulux about how to run a painting and decorating business. It felt like I was the first person to open them. These were from the 1970s and gave warnings about how sales taxes were going to be replaced with a new European model – Value Added Tax.

He just liked having stuff. I presume it’s trait that’s common for people who come from a background where they don’t have very much.

With each trip to his house I return with my own bodyweight old paper. I just grab bundles of it until I have enough to fill the car and take it home to sort at leisure. I focus on the stuff that filled the small bedroom where he kept his art materials and inspiration and leave the financial stuff to Lesley. I’m now getting to the bits of the archive that are more recent – the bits where he was losing the ability or inclination to distinguish between what was and what wasn’t important and I’m finding more and more statements and letters that went unanswered. I’m also learning lessons about myself.

I have been in danger of going the same way myself.

I keep images to act as inspiration for when I have space to be creative. Now, I keep them digitally on a Pinterest board or an email folder and I’ve been digitising or ditching old stuff. I’m not as diligent as I ought to be though and I still have far too much paper. As I’ve got into a rhythm with Lesley’s dad’s stuff I see now that I need to be as ruthless with my own papers and just get rid of them. There’s no point hanging on to them. My goals and areas of interest have been either exceeded or superseded since I saved them. There’s more than I can handle and it’s time to let them go. I don’t want anyone to have the same Why On Earth Has He Kept This!? experience when it comes time to clear up after me either.

But I have other bits and pieces too. Receipts for groceries or fuel mostly. I used to keep them, partly, because I thought it would be interesting to look in years to come to see what we bought and how much it cost but mostly because I was travelling for work so much. It got so bad that I would often wake up in a hotel room not really knowing which city I was in and looking at a receipt for a meal I’d eaten would be a good reminder later on of where I had been. But now those memories were fading. I’d noticed recently while sitting in slow moving traffic on the M25 on the way to Mum’s house that I was at a junction that had been a regular turning off point on one project. I couldn’t for the life of me remember who it had been or why I was there though. More importantly, it didn’t really bother me. That life was way behind me and what memories I had weren’t especially pleasant anyway.

The memories were fading and so too were the receipts. Time to let them go.

It’s just that there are such a lot of them and they go back years.

Bloody hell.

Author’s Note

My Mum was in a nursing home in the Thames Valley for a year and a half until she passed away in December 2024. My Father-in-law went into the same home the following January. But Lesley’s sister didn’t approve and made the situation so awkward that he had to be moved. He passed away in March 2025. Names and locations have been changed or hidden to protect the identities of those involved.

Image Credit

Original Image by Nick Gilmore. April 2025.