Extreme decluttering

"To maintain one's self on this earth is not hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply" - Henry David Thoreau

"You can't take it with you" - Kaufman & Hart

I never actually read Thoreau's Walden, but after I heard the quote as a teenager, I stuck it on my wall for ten years or more. The other quote can be traced back at least to the title of a Broadway play, but I remember it as the punchline of a sketch I performed in repeatedly to audiences in the Calder Valley of Yorkshire in September 1991, when 150 or so students joined with churches in the district hoping to persuade folks that God cares for them. It concerned a character called Lady Penelope Pinkly-Watt-Spud who sought satisfaction in her possessions, and then died. Essentially a version of the parable told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke chapter 12. I didn't stick it on my wall but I endorsed the message.

I like to think that I value living a simple life. The way I have actually lived my life suggests my values are the opposite. I work with people who have left their homes and possessions behind to go and live among the poor. And some people who've had to flee their homes because of war or natural disasters, taking hardly anything with them. Millions of people had to do that last year. I left university determined to live simply and work with homeless people. I loved a set of New Internationalist postcards I was given once which showed photos of families with their possessions around the world, and the familes who looked happy with not very many possessions. Such a photo of me would include an obscene amount of stuff, not much of it valuable, not a great deal of it useful, far too many books, papers, fabrics, furnishings, utensils, and broken things. Thousands of people in besieged Syrian towns are currently burning their possessions to keep warm and surviving on leaves, boiled water, and spices. How dare I grumble about clutter when I have the luxury of the space and security to keep it? I'm not even taking in a Syrian refugee or anything.

Occasionally I have lived a decluttered life. After a backpacking gap year during which I lived on a beach for a fortnight, I almost insisted my parents let me hitch-hike to fresher's week carrying nothing but my rucsack. In my first year of marriage I took a couple of weeks to go back to my parents and reduce the contents of my teenage bedroom to a handful of reminiscence boxes, and took them back our small terraced marital home, trying then to slim down further there.

But mostly, I have collected stuff.

I collected stuff from the earliest possessions I called my own - scrapbooks, infant school art, a centenary pamphlet for Boots the Chemists (really). Then more themed collections. Stamps. Coins. Badges. Comics. Postcards. Books. Children's pages cut out from the Radio Times when it did children's pages. Moving on to teen years: free music mags describing bands I'd never heard of and never listened to (buy NME? not me); school exercise books; diaries, prospective and retrospective; every piece of creative writing I ever did (to help literary historians track the development of my craft, of course, lol); plastic bags advertising cars picked up from the Motor Show in 1986; used ink cartridges from WH Smith ink pens, in their boxes, with a little ball bearing in each cartridge. Moving on into study and work: academic conference papers loosely related to my thesis; floppy disks (including multiple backup copies); old CVs; notes on incidents that took up a lot of time at work.

As I accumulated more, at least once I reached adulthood, I did manage to throw some things away. I did a reasonable job of clearing out some of the childhood stuff before marriage as well as in that first year, though I still regret some of the books I let go, and the fact that I sent lots of plastic to landfill. Especially in the last ten years when plastic has become more widely recycled, and I started collecting many far less significant books.

It has never got to the stage of extreme hoarding. I have never had to tunnel into a room, though often there has not been much floor space. It's not quite how I would always choose it either. On the rare occasions when I clear more living space I feel a lot better about being in that space. I have no intention of decluttering to the extreme of, say, living in a minimalist or paper-free house. The extremes are more about the amount I will have to declutter in order to have enough space and time to get on with the rest of life.

Other people would spend a couple of weeks at it maybe, or get the house clearers in, or just bin the lot. I tend to be rather keen on wanting to keep stuff out of landfill as far as I can. I worry about needing things in the future that I am thinking of discarding. I try to find someone else who would make better use of them. Or I just keep them.

It runs in the family.

One of my favourite places, growing up, was my grandmother's house. It was a large 6-bed farmhouse big enough for two families. The house and its barns were full of most interesting stuff. More Lego than I had at home, including a train set. Drawers full of card and board games from the 1930s and before. Grandfather clock, rocking chair, stuffed owls shot a century ago. A bureau with a secret drawer. A big bass drum my great-grandfather played as a boy. Many other large pieces of oak furniture he made as a cabinet maker. Two autoharps picked with feathers. Cacti brought back from Arizona. An organ with pedal pumps. Books full of glorious pictures of faraway places. Books from the 19th century. Notebooks with family history. Food stored for years. Lace tablecloths. Pretty crockery. Unusual cooking utensils. A series of rooms in the back of the old barns leading one into another with mysterious old farm machinery in them. Always so much to discover and explore, right into my mid 20s. Usually all this was kept tidy and organised, but it was also definitely cluttered.

There were three main reasons for the clutter, as I understand it. First, according to my mother, Gran's pension, which she got a few years before I was born, was her first ever income of her own. With three working and unmarried daughters living at home with her, and farm fields to rent out (she gave up farming when her husband died), she may (I imagine) have had a good deal of spending money spare. She spent it on buying up everything from the sales, or stocking up on what she might need. We still have boxes of Worcester china seconds and unopened Egyptian cotton sheets. The Fairy soap bars lasted until this century, we are still on the last Lyons coffee tin, and yesterday I counted three dozen England's Glory matchboxes.

That doesn't cover most of what I mentioned as what I liked about the house growing up. The reason for all that clutter was that it was the final resting place for a century of family heirlooms from a large Welsh farming family, the Phillipses. I use heirloom to mean stuff which isn't all financially valuable, but carries history or interest. The process by which it became final resting place must have been something like this. My great-grandfather Joseph Phillips had 11 children. Not many of them married, fewer had children, and only one - my grandfather - had grandchildren (ie myself and my sister). My grandfather farmed with his brother, and for a time they also lived with their two sisters. They inherited when the rest of the family died.

To complicate things further, Gran and her sister (who was my grandfather's brother's wife) were both great-nieces of my great-grandfather Phillips, as his brother's daughter married their father (Evan Watkins - the drummer and cabinet maker). That's first-cousin once-removed marriage - 1/32 shared genome I think. Possibly enough to account for some heritable diseases. Great-grandfather Watkins emigrated to the USA in the 1880s, leaving two sons and a dead wife there before returning to Wales with his daughters in 1910. The sons produced the family (I have dozens of distant American cousins) but the daughters preserved the family heirlooms.

There is surely a third factor behind all this, hinted at by the first two and everything I've written up to now. Surely there is a hoarding tendency in my family, whether genetic or by family script, to which I am not at all immmune.

To support that hypothesis, there is actually a second resting place for Phillips heirlooms. Great-grandfather Phillips was born in a family who were tenant farmers of another farm in Pembrokeshire. The farm was legendary as the one-time home of the family silver, a source of discord among Phillipses who accused each other of having run off with it. I understand the silver was simply a few trophies won at county shows. My great-grandfather's brother's family eventually bought that farm, and continued to farm it until the last (childless) widow died there early this century. I last visited her in 2003 and realised how full her house was of (good quality) stuff too.

The Hawker side of my family is somewhat better at not hoarding and decluttering. My wife and her family are better at it too, with some limitations; in some ways it seems a bit self-indulgent for me to spend so much time on dealing with my family clutter when I've inherited a lot more of it, and there are more productive ways to spend time.

It was around the time of my Gran's death 30 years ago that two of her daughters (P & I), still living with her, were succumbing to their heritable diseases and taking early retirement. As well as being their carer, the third sister, E, started decluttering in earnest. Or so it seems to me; actually E said last year she's been doing clearing out all her life. I think she's very good at it. From my early 20s when I came to visit there would be a pile of stuff for me to take my pickings from before it was disposed of. I generally took a lot, even if I had to store it at my parents'. Mum generally took a lot too. More rooms came into use as stuff was cleared from them, but still lots of stuff was left. After about 12 years of this E had had enough of the clutter and decided to raise the stakes by downsizing to a smaller house. We took a lot more stuff - though to be fair, more of it went. Arguably the process was helped by the woodworm that destroyed most of the oak furniture.

We thought the house E and P (Aunt I having died by then) chose - an isolated 2-bed cottage and smallholding - was crazy. That's another story. In fact they thrived there for another 18 years until P died last year. E had spent much of the time there doing more decluttering. Despite all that there was plenty left to dispose of in the next move, to a much smaller 2-bed town bungalow. She's still dealing with it as I speak. The consequence is that lots more has come my way. Diaries from the 1910s. Some of the favourite books and objects I liked from childhood. Saucepans that are better than the ones we've been using. And much more besides. This is not a complaint. I like this stuff and am grateful for it. But it amounts to a decluttering double whammy.

Double whammy because this is the same time that my mother has left the house she's lived in for 35 years for a care home, the house in which she and Dad (and my sister and I - there is after all still some of ours left there) accumulated our own family stuff, as well as a lot of the Phillips stuff previously acquired from E.

Add this to a house already full of our own stuff...some of which I would like to replace with better quality stuff from E or Mum. The double whammy is quite helpful in a way as I can potentially deal with everything together, once and for all. It also makes it a very big job. A job for which I shall have to confront and overcome my tendency to hoard.

I am giving it a year. Though I should know by the spring how well I am managing it.

I gather that I might declutter more successfully by adding one more book to my possessions.

I will aim to report back on progress. In the mean time here's the next post on teaching children to commit genocide, or not.

Update December 2017: If you really must find out what progress I've made, try here and then here. It's not very exciting.

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