There is a particular sort of box that lurks in every home, full of “memorabilia” or “mementos”. Baby teeth, divorce certificates, spare keys for locks unknown, your granny’s old Padre Pio fridge magnet, the tenancy agreement for your last flat: the whole thing is rank with association, emotion, nostalgia and pain. That box is my nemesis. That box is doom.
Because I decided that turning 40, being pregnant and training for a second career wasn’t enough to be getting on with in a single month, I am also in the lucky position of moving house. Which means opening various drawers, boxes, cupboards and ring binders, only to discover a pit of painful sentimentality or logistical confusion at every turn. But listen to me: you can get rid of these things. Your child’s reception maths book? Put it in the recycling, my friends, and feel that burden lift. A photograph of you, aged 16, at your first festival, wearing a pair of jeans you had turned into flares by stitching two triangles of denim into the ankles? Put it in the bin and never miss it. That second cheese grater given to you by a well-meaning uncle? Take it to the charity shop and delight in the feeling of relief.
God, I love throwing things away. Not the irresponsible, hellfire rush of pouring perfectly usable items into landfill, of course. But taking a box of toys to a charity shop when my son is at school? Delicious. Handing out unworn clothes to friends and neighbours? Delightful. Recycling early drafts of my book alongside an empty jam jar and a cereal box? Euphoric.
My most recent Matterhorn has been my notebooks. As a writer, I have a nagging feeling that I’m meant to keep hold of them. I’m supposed to save my notes, interviews, research and observations for the future. But why, exactly, I would want to hold on to them is a mystery. I hope that by the time I hit my dotage there will be good enough television and strong enough drugs that I won’t be spending my afternoons in a mechanical recliner chair reading back through a page of scribble about Arsenal shirts and breastfeeding from that time I met MIA in 2017. Just as I don’t particularly want my descendants to be studying the questions I drafted when I was 29 and sent to interview a long-distance lorry driver.
Frankly, I hope we will all have better things to do than read through our old notebooks. Or diaries, address books, planners, textbooks and letters. So, I put them in the recycling. I tear out the pages and throw away the cover. And like pulling a clotted mass of hair from the drain, that sweet unburdening release can cheer me up for the rest of the day.
I grew up in a house where sentimentality was a disease. When our old gas oven broke, my sister made my parents bury it in the garden with a full, flower-strewn ceremony because she wasn’t yet ready to say goodbye. My father cries every time he looks at one of the blankets crocheted by his mother – despite the fact that it is on his bed.
In this environment, it was inevitable that at least one child was going to go the other way. The cuckoo in the nest, I developed a strong and early love of getting rid. Not in a particularly mindful, does-it-spark-joy? Marie Kondo way and certainly not in a William Morris “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful” way. There is plenty in my home that is both ugly and works badly, but sadly I haven’t sold enough flowery wallpaper to be able to afford to replace it. But when the opportunity arises, do I leap at the chance to throw that stuff out of my house and move on?
You bet your box of doom I do.
