Clearing out

My wife and I - well, mostly me if truth be told - are inadvertent hoarders. Some unfortunate business with the taxman some years ago means that we have kept bank statements and books going back some twenty years - but we just ran out of room for them.

So over the last week or two we've been having a clean out, which has involved a lot of shredding of documents and disposal of same.

Sidebar - our local council will recycle waste paper, but not if it is shredded as it clogs the machinery up. So, rather than using all the old statements which we are told to shred for security reasons for recycling, I had to dump them all in the communal landfill site. Something not quite right there....

Where was I? Oh yes - the only problem is you can;t shred old chequebooks, and they have account details on so you can;t dump them. So guess what I've had to do for the last few nights?

Burn them - but they gave me a chance to read them and some memories came up. The first bike we bought Alastair. The cheque we wrote for the deposit on our current house. The pram we bought before Alastair arrived, that served well for both our boys. Memories that we carry for all our life, even if they have to go up in smoke.

I've also had to clear some things out of my personal life - all the anger and fear over the Elephant, things like that. Later today, I take Doreen to the hospital for her mastectomy. I'll let you know my feelings here over the next few days.