Let it go

No, it's not going to come in handy. Yes, I know it might, but it won't. Trust me on that.

It finally happened. After what seems like an eternity of haranguing (but which may have only been months), my Mum finally hired a skip with the purpose of clearing her garage of years of accumulated detritus. Understand: this is a double garage in which no car has been able to squeeze for many years, it's contents seeming assembled with little in way of rhyme or reason. As these things go, it's not as bizarre a collection as I would have liked, but to give you some if the flavour here's a brief rundown of it's contents (not all of which made it into the skip):

Three mattresses. Two beds. Two washing machines. An oven. A tumble drier. Two life size blow up dolls. The removing top of a Rover MG convertible. A variety of wigs. A piano. A kitchen sink. A cot. Two prams. Numerous children's toys. One dresser filled with clothes. Two broken guitars. An inflatable bouncy castle (punctured). A punching bag. Weights. An ancient computer and associated floppy disks. An entire corner dedicated to a variety of arcane audio equipment including several large speaker and amplifiers. A 20 year old video recorder. Two stereos. A bag of golf clubs. Two and half packs of laminate flooring. More rusted tools and screws and nails than any sane human being could ever need. And more, much more. All of the above survived on the basis that "it might come in handy one day". They never did.

By the time I arrived Nicky, my brother, had already made a good start at clearing out the clutter. My Mum intervened every once in a while, trying to persuade up that something should be saved. I did my best to refuse unless she could provide a better reason than "but it might come in handy one day". She drew the line at a roll of chicken wire however, and realising that she needed to take a new tack, cited that "it might be worth something", a secondary argument for which I should have been prepared but wasn't. I hesitated and was lost. The chicken wire remains, much to my aggrievance.

As was to be expected, the whole day turned out to be a trawl through the past as much as the garage. A conversation with my big sister recalled the strange and wonderful contents of the cupboard under the phone in my Gran's house, in which she kept all manner of curiosities to amuse us when we'd stay over every Friday night. Late in afternoon Nick turned a pile of wood salvaged from the garage into an impressive bonfire, around which we gathered and reminisced. Later on, after the family had dined, we toasted marshmallows over the dying embers and watched the fire fade until it could no longer hold back the winter chill.

It was a memorable day.