There comes a time in every (untidy) man’s life where he has to just knuckle down and deal with it. It’s just too easy to shut the door, ignore the problem, procrastinate and delay. It’s no good seeking help. Experts in the field are no good. A man’s got to do… and all that.
Yesterday, I tidied my study.
It’s not a very large room. It’s just big enough to get a single bed in it and not much else. 6 feet wide and 8 feet 6 inches long, to be exact. Our daughter had this room until she was about 15 and we had an extension built and it really was a challenge. Since then, it has been my “study”. It’s not really a study, but it’s a place where the Mac is and the scanners and the printers and all that stuff. The old cameras and lenses sit on shelves, alongside boxes of negatives, old DVD-R disks with backups that can no longer be read. My first ever Mac is on the top shelf. Not for the first time in ten years, of course, I hasten to add, but every so often a concerted effort is required.
It took about 8 hours. Not because of the amount of junk and rubbish in there – although there is quite a lot that needs to be taken to the tip – but because stuff needs sorting before you know what to do with it. There are lots of negatives that need to be filed, for example (a job for later today). Then there are the dozens and dozens of envelopes with prints and other negatives in. Boxes of them. These need to be left for another day when they can be properly sorted and filed. Half of the time it took to deal with this situation, was probably spent looking at negatives and 6×4 prints. I found this one from a couple of years ago, for example…
And I also found these, from a little earlier…
1978
1988
Amazing how some people are blessed with not ageing too badly… <cough>
The shredder gave up the ghost twice while shredding old bank statements, insurance documents etc no longer required…
There is a PCWorld-full of old wires, old chargers for bits of kit long-since broken or lost or just ignored. A printer that should go on eBay. The digital camera that we took to Florida that hasn’t been used for 9 or 10 years. And this doesn’t include the stuff that’s in the wardrobe I built into the wall 15 years ago. That’s another day’s work, at least, but at least the door can be shut on that particular challenge.
All this has got me thinking about the amount of transient stuff we collect. Useful for a year or two if it’s lucky, then that’s it. Stuff that we have worked hard to buy and pay for. Stuff that then gets thrown away. Stuff that can’t be recycled.
I get the same feeling when looking at the garage. Like most people’s garages, these days, the idea of putting a car in it is laughable, at least for now. I open the door and look in and think “I have bought all of this stuff” and wonder when the last time a lot of it was actually used. Tools get bought for a specific purpose then never see the light of day again (there’s only so many times you need to lay tiles on a kitchen floor – once).
I don’t think that there’s much that can be done about this, in the modern world. Unless we all return to Victorian times, give up anything with a wire or a chip in it and stop doing DIY.
Anyway, let’s see what hidden gems the pile of negative archive pages bring this morning.
Still My Turn This Year 