Tuesday 1 February 2022
There’s a skeleton in my loft.
Really; here’s a picture of it…
Obviously it’s not a real skeleton, just a plastic one that
comes out once a year to be strung up at the front of the house to lure in
terrified young trick or treaters at Halloween. There are many other things in
the loft too with maybe a few skeletons from my past among them.
This week I started systematically going through the
lifetime of clutter than is stored at the top of the house, with the objective
of binning, or giving away, as much of it as possible. The reason is simple:
with my Parkinson’s getting progressively worse I don’t know how much longer
I’ll be able to climb up the steep loft ladder, and more importantly, actually
bring anything back down the ladder.
It may seem premature to start purging my life like this,
but Parkinson’s forces you to plan ahead. The time to sort stuff out is now.
Later might simply be too late, such is the unpredictability of the progression
of this debilitating condition.
And so, I find myself leafing though old school books,
university lecture notes, theatre and sports programmes, travel journals and
notebooks, photos and love letters from my teens and twenties, and thirty years
of corporate bumph. I repeatedly jam the shredder with wads of bank and credit
card statements, rental agreements, car service reports, you name it:
previously a meticulous record-keeper, none of this stuff seems to matter
anymore.
There are boxes full of gadgets and cables, long out of date
tech; even some VHS tapes and floppy discs – remember those? There is sports equipment I will never use
again: tennis, squash and badminton racquets, running spikes, power kites, golf
clubs. There is climbing and mountaineering gear: ropes, carabiners, harness,
mountaineering boots, crampons and ice axe that once took me over 6,000 meters
in The Himalayas. Similarly, there is camping gear including a four-seasons
sleeping bag, cooking stove and fuel.
There are a few things I’ll keep of course like some travel
souvenirs, a few memories of childhood, and most of the photos. I will allow
myself a little nostalgia, but most of it has to go sometime, so it’s better
that it goes now.
I think the Halloween skeleton will stay, but, if not in the
loft, then where…? And as for any other skeletons I come across, now seems like
a good time to eradicate them. Forever.
