A peep at life through an old set of drawers

A bit like moving house, an impending change in workplace location seems to bring its own pressures, mostly emotional.  I never realised that poring through old files, pictures, letters, CDs and books could transport the mind and spirit into a place that only seems to have been a day away . . . and yet in cases it’s been 30 years ago.

Most of us probably harbour some degree of a hoarding instinct. Little did I realise that I had stored up documentation about a new tractor model, the layers of the atmosphere, a trip to Italia ’90 or a printed weather forecast from a week in May, 2004.

Here and there on random TV viewing treks, I’ve come across programmes about ‘professional hoarders’ – the people who just cannot rid of anything in their houses.

The result of the fanatical hoarders tends to be pretty catastrophic with barely enough route space to access the rooms in the house. Junk takes up space – an awful lot of space.

And yet, I don’t how many times maybe around the garden shed or the farmyard when I’ve made a decision that a plant, piece of iron or rusty tool is of no use any more, only to curse aloud a few days later when the discarded item is just what I needed to plug some gap or hole.

I’ll invent a word for the practice – ‘hoardaphilia’ – and it’s not the easiest of conditions to shake off, even if strongly armed with a determined initial resolve to end up with a clean sheet in terms of both materials and emotion.

Going through old stuff for the purpose of discarding is in a way a bit like looking back on your life with all its little ups-and-downs . . . the parties, the retirements, the work colleagues we knew for years who are no longer with us.

It works in much the same way as a song or piece of music from the past that transports your mind back into a time and place now long gone from your life.

Years back, I had an old uncle blessed with a photographic memory but as the years rolled by and he slipped into his 80s, we would find it hilarious how he sometimes would miss out completely on a generation. Instead of the son or daughter, he’d actually be meaning the grandfather or grandmother. Over the past week, I kind of tuned into what was happening with him.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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