4 September 2009 (Friday) - Clearing Out

For once I wasn’t woken by “Bear Ruckus” at 5.45am. I did think that was due to last night’s practicing closing the front door quietly. But the womenfolk of the house were complaining about his racket, so I must have slept thought it.

After a bit of brekky I carried on with the chucking out of rubbish. I’ve got this utterly unreasonable ambition to be able to get all my books onto shelves - rather than having them in tottering stacks in various places all over the house. And so I’ve decided that in order to make sufficient shelf space, some of the older books must go. The mildewed falling apart Enid Blytons are history. As are the astronomy books from the seventies which are now hopelessly out of date. And I’m also getting shot of reference stuff I never use - the D.I.Y books, the gardening rubbish, it’s all gone. After all, who needs reference books when you’ve got the internet? And anything by Peter Hamilton has gone too. Great big books that I never finish.

‘er indoors ^TM had a veritable hoard of books littering my shelves. She’s not looked at any of them for years. I know that because it’s not been possible for her to get to the book shelves for years because of all the other tat which was in the way. I wondered if I should ask her, or whether I should just ding them. She would never know… In the end my innate cowardice got the better of me, and she has graciously allowed me to relocate her dust covered collection to a shelf downstairs that I’d forgotten about. That’s freed up some space.

Whilst doing all this, I took the opportunity to see what books we actually have got. It’s only when you have a good clear out that you realise what’s there. We had (at least) two copies of over a dozen books between us. I’ve finally got all the Adrian Mole books back together again. To say nothing of the myriad Viz books which were all over the place.

And the software I’ve dinged out – all the old versions of Serif PagePlus. Why did I keep them? And so many manky old disks which ran on Windows 95 & 98. Several versions of Encarta from the mid-90s. And how many copies of “Worms” does anyone need? And then there are the CDs. It must be over ten yeas since anyone’s played “The Smurfs Go Pop”. Or any of the other dust-encrusted CDs which sit below the Smurfs CDs. And ordnance survey maps. An OS map of Ashford so old it hasn’t got the Ashford to Maidstone motorway section. Four OS maps of Hastings. All now gone.

Whilst at the tip I had to exercise iron self control. One of the normal people was throwing away a huge water feature; purely because the pump was broken. He said I was welcome to it…. It was close, but I said no.