I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a bit of a hoarder. I don’t mean the gross kind that you see on tv though, with rooms full of manky old newspapers and a family of feral rabbits living in their knicker drawer. The ads alone for those shows are enough to make me squirm and frantically scramble for the remote so I can change the channel, almost as fast as the sound of the Hollyoaks theme tune does.
This realisation dawned on me while at home with my parents a few weeks ago. Dad put the heart across me when he mentioned that he’d recently brought a bag filled with soft toys to the charity shop, and I thought he meant MY ones, which have been in the attic for around fifteen years at this stage. He didn’t though. My god, the relief. Freddy Teddy and Puffalump live to fight another day with their fuzzy cohorts, safely stashed away in a black plastic bag.
I’ve always had a tough time throwing things away when it comes to doing a big clear out. There’s a bag of clothes in the corner of the bedroom earmarked for the charity shop and it’s been there for months now. I’m afraid that if I open it I’ll suddenly realise that I might actually need all of these clothes I haven’t worn in around two years and they’ll all end up back in the wardrobe.
However, sometimes keeping all this stuff can be unexpectedly useful. I’ve kept all the wristband and timetable lanyards from every festival (and boring conference – WHY?) I’ve ever been to. So when Electric Picnic announced this year’s discounted tickets for people who attended three or more times, I was all set with my drawer full of dusty proof.
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My boyfriend finds it equally difficult to dump things, and has an ever-expanding collection of VHS tapes. They’re quite an easy thing to collect, as people are only too happy to get rid of their old videos, while we gather them up and squirrel them all away in our tiny flat. We’ve made a bit of a feature out of them though, as they’re all arranged in gradients of colour, so they look lovely! See? (I'd just like to point out that we do actually have a working video player which we use. We’re not completely mad.)
It’s a habit that I definitely picked up from my Dad, as Mam is utterly ruthless when clearing things out. Dad said himself that she’d throw me into the skip if I stood still long enough.
So which camp do you fall into? Are you a seasoned thrower-away of things or do you end up keeping as much stuff as you can? And if you do hoard/collect (collect sounds so much better, really) anything, has your pile of stuff ever come in unexpectedly handy?
