Tidying the Attic

(from 2011)

One of the delights of a public holiday is the incentive – with a bit of prodding from family – to “sort out” the attic.

Our family are inveterate hoarders, each individually denying it, but collectively having to fess up. The manuals on clutter advise that if something has been in storage for longer than a year, you no longer need it. Dispose. Promptly. Be Firm. Now. Humph.

So this last holiday we ventured into the attic. The first thing we managed to clear were the ancient cardboard boxes for electrical appliances that had long since gone to that great scrap heap in the sky. Even then, there was a lot of stuff.

Books. Not books we regularly use – they fill the actual rooms in the house below the attic, but ones kept “just in case” or for nostalgia reasons. Plus tons of my daughter’s stuff. She got married well over eleven years ago, and lives in a house that is larger than ours, but somehow we still seem to be the repository.

So what books did we unearth, and what nostalgic memories came flooding back? My first taped box unearthed books on conjuring. As a teenager I was well into magic tricks. My very first paid job (part-time) involved demonstrating conjuring tricks and other “toys” in a department store leading up to Christmas. I veered into magic tricks involving “thought transference” which didn’t sit all that well with my religious convictions – although I KNEW that what I did was trickery, because I KNEW how it was done. Outlets for demonstrating my “powers” were sort of limited in my circle, and the hobby took a back seat and soon disappeared off the radar. But yes – a couple of books as a distant memory – there they were, unopened for – well, quite a long time.

Then there were the textbooks on Gregg’s shorthand. Ah yes – Gregg’s shorthand. Because I planned to work for nothing for a religious charity, I needed lucrative part-time work. Secretarial – a well-meaning relative had this idea – shorthand-typing – that was it! Actually, it never was – but I went to classes and got my 100 wpm shorthand and 50-60 wpm typing. It was not exactly a macho teenage boy thing – I ended up as the only male in a class full of girls. Ten years before I had been the only male in a tap dancing troupe in a pantomime in which my father appeared – that was absolute purgatory – but now this was rather nice. As it happened, copy typing was already pushing shorthand into the cold, and anyway – I soon graduated to composing letters for others typists to produce – and at 50-60 wpm it was generally easier to knock them out myself and save on staff. But yes – Gregg’s – all those lovely short forms and perfected arguments to put down all those deluded people in the UK who still struggled with Pitman’s.

My wife’s hoard included the Montessori nursery nurse course. She started work in nursery nursing, before going to Spain to work for the same religious group as I had, when it were still illegal in the dying days of Franco. After detours in life – a major one was marrying me – she became a college lecturer in Spanish, French and Portuguese. Now “retired” she is conquering Welsh. (In-joke – Doctor to Patient – Don’t worry Mr Jones – we’ve found the problem – you’re not dyslexic – you’re Welsh!)

And the fiction books! Now we are both on eReaders, all sort of fiction gets stored in the attic – just in case. The detective fiction – ranging from the strict puzzle based on conjuring principles, with cardboardity of character to match, to modern authors where the turn of phrase is everything, and the plot incidental. Two whole boxes of Simon Brett. A TV producer and sitcom writer, who knocks out numerous tongue-in-cheek pastiches of the “golden age”. Phrases that stick in the mind – a description of the hero’s estranged wife driving a yellow mini – “She roared into the school car park like an avenging slab of butter” – a  dodgy receptionist – “a simpering teenager of 45, with hair from a color chart not supplied by God”. Those boxes got opened – a lot of tidying up time lost – before they were ultimately lugged downstairs.

Cartoons books by Styx. No-one today has heard of him – but he was very prolific in his day, and on occasion originals turn up on eBay. The jokes were thin even at the time, but the drawings were brilliant. I modelled my own style on his when illustrating a couple of books – for him it came effortlessly, for me it was hard work.

Notes and visual aids for long ago courses I taught. Actually, one of them did turn up as useful. A few years ago an anxious phone call asked if I could drop everything when illness knocked out someone taking a modern version of the same course – it was all set up and no-one wanted it cancelled. A frantic scrabble in the attic unearthed from nearly twenty years before all my notes and drawings and jokes – (very important to keep people awake) – and being self employed, I was able to make up the lost money in the days ahead. So they all went back into storage with new material thought up for the occasion. Who knows – I might get asked again in another twenty years time...

So where has it left us? All the dead cardboard boxes went into the dumpster. Bootloads of stuff went to our favorite charity shop – and we only bought a little in return – honest. But I don’t know what it is, the attic looks a bit tidier, but overall it still looks very much the same.

Possessions multiply to fill the space available for them – and for hoarders the process just keep on going. I just hope we don’t get totalled crossing the road together and someone else has to try and make sense of it all. They would have a job.