3 hours ago
7
Does anyone want some bits of guttering? They’re zinc, I think. Free to a good, or indeed any home! I’ll send them to you or even, to be on the safe side, deliver them myself. Because it would be mad to keep them, although not quite as mad as throwing them away. Please help.
I get this a lot, which is why I’ve got too much stuff. There’s stuff I’ve bought that I shouldn’t have. There’s stuff that I’ve bought, used, and is now of no use, because it’s become obsolete or it’s conked out. In the case of the guttering it’s the leftovers from a renovation, so not entirely my fault. And always, all around the house there are random bits and bobs of all shapes and sizes which I could and should get shot of. As a cry to myself for help I bought a book about decluttering called Clutter’s Last Stand. It was quite good but then, with weary irony, I lost it among the clutter. Perhaps it’ll show up one day.
I only know one thing: that if I do throw something away thinking I’ll never need it, as sure as eggs is eggs, it will turn out to be the very thing I do need. So I have to go out and buy it again, which is the most annoying thing. I get this form of madness from my mum, who keeps everything. For years she held on to the fringes of old-style sheets of postage stamps, just sticky little offcuts of perforated paper. What for? She didn’t really know, and neither did I.
But then, when one of my daughters was little, she messed up a bit of writing and was upset about it. There were tears. The Tipp-Ex had been kept so long it had solidified. Despair reigned.
Then a lightbulb lit up above my mum’s head. Aha! Off she went and returned in triumph bearing the stamp-edging. Just the job to stick over the gone-wrong writing. But the difference between me and my mum is that, while I too might well have kept the stamp-edging, there is not a chance in hell I’d have been able to lay my hands upon it when the potential moment of glory presented itself. If you’re going to be a hoarder, you’d better be organised, which I am not.
I interviewed Dilly Carter, a professional organiser, and chief declutterer on the TV show Sort Your Life Out. It’s not the kind of thing I watch, but it’s a good programme. If you’ve not seen it, the team go into someone’s house while they’re not in and gasp at the general chaos. They then clear the place, taking every bit of stuff to an aircraft hangar where it’s spread out over the floor. The householders are then confronted with this spectacle and gasp obligingly. Obviously, as this is television the gasp is compulsory, but I’d wager most of our jaws would drop if confronted with all our possessions laid out before us.
Dilly speaks of the calmness that the clearout can bring you. I get that. And I’d dearly love to unburden myself of at least half of everything I possess. But apart from the fear that I’ll one day have a use for the thing I’m binning, the thought of anything going into landfill weighs heavily on my soul.
In the brilliant Netflix documentary Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy, Paul Polman, ex-head of Unilever, put it brilliantly when he said that when people talk about throwing stuff away, the problem is that there is no such thing as “away”. It has to end up somewhere. With clothes especially, we make ourselves feel better about binning them by giving them to charity, which is fine as far as it goes, but there’s evidence that charity shops are running out of space. In Buy Now!, we see bales of worthless clothes dumped in the sea off the coast of west Africa.
In the episodes of Sort Out Your Life I watched, I heard no mention of landfill. Don’t get me wrong – the show makes valuable points about the mindlessness of buying piles of stuff we don’t need and how it can end up causing chaos and unhappiness. But all the possessions the householders could be persuaded to bin seemed to be earmarked for either reselling, donating or recycling rather than for, you know, the bin. Really? I had a bit of a bicker with Dilly about this, but she insisted that if you tried hard enough, you could find a home for almost everything.
OK, point taken: perhaps I’ve not been putting in the effort. I’ll recycle what the council wants to take, and on occasion visit a dump. But that’s about it. Time to stop moaning, lean in and raise my game, starting with the guttering. All this gleaming zinc, some straight, some bent. Something for everyone. Surely a good home could be found.
I thought about selling it but this seemed an ambitious project with which to start my eBay career. Instead, I asked the nice bloke from the guttering supplier the builder had used if he’d have it back. He politely declined. I pointed out that he could surely sell it to someone, that I didn’t want any money for it and I’d even take it to him, free of charge. Getting slightly hysterical I reiterated that I JUST DON’T WANT TO THROW THE BLOODY STUFF AWAY. “Yeah, it does seem a waste,” he replied. And that’s the last I heard from him.
I’ll not be beaten. It’s all in the back of my car now, clanking around like nobody’s business. You can hear me coming a mile off, a miserable latter-day Willy Loman, not only failing to make a sale, but unable even to give his wares away.
