One of my aims when I retired was to de-clutter the house. To get rid of all the things we don’t use anymore, drastically reduce the number of 'House Makeover' and 'Garden' magazines lying around the place and to organise the bill paying procedures by introducing a filing cabinet rather than have the bills on a shelf in the kitchen.


Organising the paperwork was simple. I explained to Christine my ideas on how to run our finances and Christine, who has done this job very well on her own for fifteen years whilst I have been working away all week, simply smiled and said “excellent” and went off for coffee with her friend Vivien. That was easy I thought. What I hadn’t realised at that time was that Christine had now handed the job over to me and I could of course do it however I wanted. It is now my job! Not sure how that happened.


Getting rid of magazines has proved more difficult. I decided to clear the bottom of my wardrobe which has, over the period of the upheaval caused by the builders, turned into a bit of a dumping ground for things without a home. At the back was a pile of twenty two 'Country Home' magazines. I pull them out and present them to Christine who starts to look through them. The twelve oldest were selected for the bin, they were up to 2002, anything later than that was returned to the wardrobe where they will stay untouched for another year. Still it’s a start.


As I said on Monday, last weekend we had to empty the kitchen for the new one to be fitted. This gave us a great opportunity to go through all the cupboards and drawers and get rid of things we don’t use. Maybe!
It becomes apparent that everything we have falls into two categories either “we can’t throw that away it was a present from ……….”, or “we can’t throw that away it belonged to ……….”

For instance out from the back of a cupboard I produce two blue mugs with saucers, I haven’t seen these since we moved into this house and assume we can get rid. No. These were an engagement present! Our engagement, that was in 1964, forty two years ago, they haven’t seen the light of day for at least twenty years but they are now to go in our new kitchen.


We have the plastic poles that separated the tiers on Alex’s wedding cake plus the decorations from the top, they were retained. We have utensils that we don’t know what they are and have certainly never used but we keep them because of who they came from. We find four wooden spoons, I have never seen us use more than one at a time, we keep them all. We have plastic things, wooden things three whatevers with old wooden green handles, cake icing guns, baking shape cutters all of which must be keep because of memories. They will never be used unless of course Christine with the new kitchen and large range cooker starts to bake scones and make cakes etc! Sorry I’m having a fantasy again, it will never happen.


But the best fun came from the food cupboards. I know everyone has the four year old tin of rhubarb and the ancient peach halves but we had packets of yeast. “I use that when I bake bread” say’s Christine. The last time bread was baked in our house, we lived in our old house and we have been here for twenty two years. It went to the bin (don't tell her). We had various jars, tins and packets that were past sell-by date which went to the bin but we also had more than a few items without a sell-by date, I wasn’t sure whether this was because they didn’t go off or because they were bought before sell by dates were an issue. They all went in the bin anyway.


The saddest thing was at the back of a cupboard I found six cans of Boddingtons beer dated June 2004, I may just give them a go it’s only two years out of code, may be OK, I wonder!


Well, we finally finished going through all the cupboards and surprisingly we have quite a few items to be binned but just as I’m about to get rid of them, Christine says “we can take them to the charity shop”. They have all now joined everything else I have tried to throw away over the past ten years, in the shed, waiting to go to the charity shop. Christine just wants one more look to make sure nothing important is going out. The problem is that Christine never gets to have that 'one more look' so the pile in the shed gets bigger, the charity shop never gets anything and my shed is full of junk. It’s all too hard.