Authors Electric

 We've just had the de-clutterers round again, and I think they've at last finished with the front room. After a couple of sessions earlier in the year they had got rid of most of the complete rubbish, so this time they reached the far corners of the room and retrieved some treasures, relatively speaking. Old photographs and holiday souvenirs, a bit of family jewellery, more sheet music, and what seemed like thousands of letters from my mother. To put this in some sort of context, the front room had started out as quite an organised sitting-room, had morphed into my bedroom for a while and then into a store-room which as well as our own family clutter had accommodated whatever was left over when we cleared out first my mother's house and then my brother's some years ago. While I was in hospital having my hip replaced, family members had pushed things into the corners to make sure I had enough space to walk about in safely, and then the next time I was in hospital, havin...

Research... books ‘De-cluttering’ - as throwing out once-loved possessions is now called - is not really, as they say, my bag . That is, our home is set about with all kinds of delightful objects, all   much loved: books (in bookcases, more than ten, now I stop to count), and ornaments, cushions (great fun to throw around if you’re a visiting grandchild), paintings, pot plants, and of course, not forgetting, The Cat. None of these is ‘clutter’ except, perhaps,The Cat when he insists on sharing the screen and ‘helping’ with   a Zoom call. However, the delight when something precious suddenly moves from one category - necessary research - to another - old information never again needed! Having just spent an hour or so browsing through super-stuffed lever-arch files, casting a last look over wonderfully informative scientific articles and sociological comment pieces on lifestyle today, it’s possible to say of nearly all these that they’ll not be needed again!   Once much lov...

I often say life's too short for de-cluttering, and I still firmly believe it is - until suddenly time is too short not to de-clutter. I ran up against this problem at my day job recently, when we had to clear everything out of our office and move to a different, and not entirely preferable, one in the basement. There are two windows in our new office, but they might as well not be there, because the only tantalising glimpse of the outside world is of a tall grassy bank topped by a 6 foot high hedge. But I mustn't go on and on about that now. One of the few benefits of the new office is that the people responsible for refurbishing it have at last agreed that we should have light switches, which you would imagine are more or less essential in any interior but which we didn't have in our office upstairs for reasons I had better not even start going into here. Another benefit is that the room is so dark and cosy that everyone has begun to refer to it as the Bat Cave. I hope t...