The ruthless elimination of accumulation

My grandma is 90 today – happy birthday to her, what a thing. Not that she’ll see this, because how will I explain the fact that I have a website or even what a blog is, a repository for digitally vomited thoughts. She is fairly tech savvy, I shall give her that. She operates an iPad with aplomb and messages from her iPhone. She joined WhatsApp recently too, which I precisely the sort of thing that I would rely on my 80s to be able to say absolutely not to.

I went over to see her at the weekend, to check if there were any little jobs I could help with. A decent list of them, it turns out, but she was on good form. My grandad died a few months ago, and our recent wedding anniversary was on the same day as theirs – it was 65 years this July since they got married. A mind boggling passage of time, and obviously you accumulate a lot of stuff during that. Especially if you’ve lived in the same house since 1963 when it was newly built and you really can remember when it was all fields.

Grandma has been dumping things with impressively ruthless efficiency (though full disclosure, she’s German), though in some ways I’m surprised grandad was even allowed to accumulate it all. We found all of his wage slips from 1981 through to the end of 1984. Gone. Though I did keep the one from just after when I was born as a sort of memento. Someone else will have to chuck that out in a few years. An old pair of glasses, gone. Bundles of correspondence from when he was church secretary in 1979. Gone.

It really struck me as we were leafing through much of these things – grandad was a draughtsman by trade, and all of his notes for correspondence and various other things were on the backs of technical drawings he must have kept for scrap – it struck me that all of this stuff was highly meaningful to him. There were some stones in a box full of things from the late 1950s that must have come from somewhere special, but there’s no one left alive to verify.

So much of my life is going to be a simple case of moving to the recycle bin when I go, there won’t even be the impetus of wanting to get the shelf space back so sift through the potted highlights of whatever I’ve been up to. I should say here that this isn’t me being morose, I’m actually thinking how much lighter I should be travelling anyway. There’s so much nonsense I keep stuffed around me that I somehow feel is important, not enough to even pull out and look at on a regular basis. My brain curdles at the thought of having to move house at a point in the reasonably near future, but much of what is in my eye line I probably don’t need. I should go all Marie Kondo, but I’m far too lazy.