Twenty five years of memories

We hired a skip this weekend, and have been busy emptying the attic and the darker corners of the house into it. Twenty five years worth of boxes for cameras, televisions, video game machines, computers - along with the actual chassis of long dead computers, monitors, and endless boxes of wires, guide books, plugs, adapters, and everything else that “might be useful one day”.

We found a broken acoustic guitar along the way, and an onyx chess set.

Imagine Monica’s cupboard from Friends, but the size of an entire floor of a house.

We found countless children’s costumes, bags of clothes, and toys the children had grown out of along the way.

It was difficult not to stop and look - to reminisce, and to tell stories. It was time for it to go.

In some ways the clear-out reminded me of my grandparents giving me an old record player from their spare room when I was young - one that held multiple singles on a spindle, and dropped each onto a turntable, one after another. It was accompanied by the remains of a record collection that had no doubt been the prized collection of my aunts and uncles when they were small - or had been bought by my grandparents along the way - everything from The Sound of Music, to West Side Story, Alvin and his Magic Harmonica, Sparky the Magic Piano, Terry Scott, Cliff Richard, and Mario Lanza. I played them all to death. I think my favourite - at about nine years old - was “You need feet” by Bernard Breslaw.

I also inherited a reel-to-reel tape recorder. We played with it until it didn’t work any more, but never really understood properly how it worked.

In later years I inherited a radio-gram - a prized piece of 1970s furniture that doubled as a side-board and record player. It had one record hidden inside it - “Rhinestone Cowboy” by Glen Campbell. When you started the record player from cold, the record would speed up and slow down hilariously.

Somehow we avoided giving any of the treasures discovered in the dark corners of the attic to the kids - it all ended up in the skip. Granted, we didn’t have record players or radio-grams. We did find a rather ominous diary, written by one of our daughters while young - filled with the most disjoined stream of thought anybody has seen outside of a psychological horror movie. We climbed down the loft ladder and showed it to her - she almost peed her pants laughing.

So yes. That’s what we spent our entire weekend doing. Filling a skip with memories and detritus from 25 years of life as a young couple, life with young children, and life with teenagers. It’s been amazing really - discovering just how much rubbish you collect if you’re not careful.

Being entirely honest, I didn’t spend the entire weekend emptying the loft - this afternoon I learned the ins-and-outs of a simulated “CIV-A” navigation computer from a Boeing 707, and then recorded a video about it. I know how to live.

p.s. the youngest member of our household has not only learned to crawl, but also to stand. It’s only a matter of time until the stair gates will have to go up. Guess who’s job that will be.