John Griff Column: When having a clearout means something slightly different...

Naturally, there is a reason for this introspective revelation. For a long time I’ve been able to ignore something which I knew to be true when I moved into the house I’ve owned for the past decade or so. Now that I am finally on the point of selling it and moving out (it has been a long and tortuous two-year process to date), there is a day of reckoning to be navigated.

But we’re not quite there yet.

My house is the kind that has a very useful and capacious loft. It also has a decent sized office and studio at the bottom of the garden, a reasonably sized workshop shed at the top of the garden, and a fair-sized garage. Into all four spaces during the past decade or so have gone the mementos of not one but two careers (banking and broadcasting), a surprisingly large number of block photographs (some more artistic than others), a needlessly large collection of duvets and pillows, way too many mechanical tools, a lot of wood offcuts, many microphone cables, and enough laptops from way back when to start a small electronics shop. There are cans of paint, aged tubes of filler (exterior and interior) a lot of remote-control plug extensions, and no less than five folding chairs – the kind that you lug around a festival campsite or racetrack and then, as the heavens open and you head back to the car/tent/onsite bar, wonder why you bothered with them in the first place. The list goes on – who would keep a crashed radio-controlled helicopter (it flew for all of three seconds before my untutored piloting skills drove it into the unyielding sod)?

The thing is, once they’re there, all nicely stored under the famed ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’ methodology of life, things tend to stay where they are, as though they have not only found their own homes but have also earned the right to stay there forever, not harming anyone, but going largely unused. Maybe that’s the nub of my problem.

In a bizarre way I get attached to things, as though they are more than inanimate objects. They take on characteristics with foibles of their own and I end up having almost an emotional relationship with them. Over and over again I have found myself thinking ‘One day I might slim down into those trousers – they’re too good to throw out’ or ‘I’m sure I’ll be able to fix that and use it again when the time comes...’. All very laudable, but I bet you’re nodding now – because we don’t slim back into those trousers, and ‘the time’ seems never to arrive. Eventually you find yourself in the situation of having to move house again, which is where the dilemma arises. Can I afford to buy another house big enough to store all the old stuff, never mind the new stuff which will surely follow? I’ve often wondered if, as people move, bigger and more expensive homes are simply bigger and more expensive repositories for life’s ‘stuff’ which is little more than rubbish. Well, no more.

Just over a week ago a six cubic yard (imperial measures, no less) skip arrived outside my house. In the seven days which then followed, I turfed out about forty years of belongings which had disappeared into the loft, the office, the shed and the garage, but which really hadn’t seen the light of day since disappearing. It wasn’t a comfortable exercise I assure you. On the contrary – I truly wrestled with myself over what should stay and what should go. The problem was a very simple one. Lois owns the house in which we’re both living, and there isn’t the space for my stuff too – so I need a storage unit until we buy somewhere bigger. There is absolutely no point in renting space for old tat, so out the tat has had to go. Promises of ‘you’ll feel better when it’s gone’ went some way towards giving me the resolve to get on with it – but ultimately there was nothing more to be said and a lot to be done.

Strangely, throwing out the ephemera of one’s life has a kind of cathartic effect. Box after box of items forgotten and untouched for years thudded into the bottom of the skip until there was a bizarre kind of break-even point of realisation that I’d stopped resenting the process as much as I thought I would. Some things surfaced to surprise me though – my father’s war medals, an old scrapbook and some photograph albums stopped me in my tracks – but otherwise, it all went into the skip until it was finally full.

The skip left shortly after – taking with it lots destined for recycling, some for landfill, and the physical prompts (or props?) from a huge number of memories. Weirdly, the space the skip left outside my house felt like a metaphor – just as for many, a lot has come to an end in my life in the past few years, so maybe this physical clearout has emotional if not directly mental implications for the future. I’m not particularly good at dealing with change and never have been – I tend to put down deep roots and it takes me a lot to uproot them again. I am an only child and from the day I was born until I moved into my first own home, my parents and I lived in the same house, so perhaps that shaped me in a certain way. Now considerably older, I’ve owned just three homes to date.

Over the next month I’ve still got to clear the house of everything that remains – some will go into my new sea container of a storage unit. I’ve got to work out how to dismantle some sofas, do some boxing up and some all-hours van driving. Hopefully I can make some donations too so that still-useful stuff sees a new life.

Maybe clearing out is clearing up instead – and clearing up for something new and exciting to come along. I can work with that.