Introducing our correspondent…
I am nearly 57 years old and I have been married to Bryan for 35 years. I have two grown-up children and work as a secretary in a local law firm. I love reading, my garden, my home - dare I say it I’m about as boring as it gets.
I was born in the Vale of Belvoir from parents born within a couple of miles of each other, who in their turn were came from people born within a few miles of each other. The gene pool was slightly deepened by my maternal grandfather who settled in the Vale when he was posted there as Signalman in WWI and he originated in Yorkshire.
Dad farmed, not in a grand way, no one did in those days. He followed on from his father with no one ever even hinting that he might quite like to have a go at something else. My uncles and cousins farmed in the same low key mixed farming way of what is now a bygone age but that was the world I grew up in. Jill Dewey, 2012
Jill writes:
I may have my tiny faults but hoarding isn’t one of them: a genetic aberration since I come from a long line of hoarders, the greatest of which was my Dad.
I have only just been able to bring myself to sort out Dad’s woodshed. It always looked as though it would fall down at any minute but like everything else Dad did, it was constructed with a thoroughness that took four men three days to dismantle. What was in it is hard to describe. I mean, you had to be there: wood of course, full of worm and covered in cobwebs but definitely wood and lots of it. Gardening magazines, twenty years of them rendered by damp into papier mache. Bags of cement rendered by damp into hard-core and horse collars rendered by damp into disintegration.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, had been thrown away. Some things were most interesting: a chatty 1932 letter crammed with the minutiae of village life written to Dad when he was in hospital for some reason no one alive on the planet now remembers, although I do recall an incident with an air-rifle being mentioned, but that’s another story. But a broken pedal-bin and the box it’s successor came in; why?
There were icons I couldn’t bear to part with, a tin of Whiskey Flake which damp had rendered &etc... but for everything else there’s The Tip. The Tip is a wonderful place staffed by Real Men who are deaf to entreaties and Household goes into Household and you don’t put plastic with wood. We’ve made so many trips now, they recognise us by sight and no longer feel it necessary to keep a watching brief as we disgorge our Focus.
I have had a nice long Christmas break so set about my most favourite task - decluttering. My parents lived through a World War and my grandparents lived through two World Wars, so the tendency to hang on to things just in case is understandable. I, on the other hand, have no such excuse so it’s down to The Tip we go. “Regrets, I’ve had a few”, as the song says but it goes on “too few to mention” and the joy of cupboard doors that close without violence and drawers which display their contents at first glance far outweighs the fact that I really cannot seem to find those horse collars!
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