I'm now back in the UK from Bolivia and adjusting to the strangeness of life in Britain (e.g. neon lights everywhere; my first week back I waited for the bus on the wrong side of the road). While I was away in Bolivia for most of the previous eighteen months, my mum was supposed to clear out the house ready for my parents to try to move. I get back and nothing in the house has changed. My sister and I, finally fed-up with the prevaricating, decide to take matters into our own hands. Last weekend we stepped boldly into the world of the drawers in the hall; a world which, by the looks of its contents, no intrepid explorer had ventured into during the modern era. Catalogue after catalogue came tumbling out. Great Universal 1993 being the oldest. Oh, the shell suits! When we were finished, the two sets of of cheap draws were taken out into the garden and smashed up. A cathartic experience.
The next day, it was the turn of the wardrobe inside my brother's room. If the past is a foreign country, then perhaps I should have had my passport on me. Inside there were such treasures as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle kite-string, cassettes recorded at a meeting in 1982, and a 1980s style microphone. I was forced to repeatedly turn to my mum and ask her: "What is this?". At the bottom of the drawers was a West Ham United scarf knitted by my grandmother around 50 years ago, which I never remember seeing before, and which my dad said that he hadn't set eyes on for about the last 20 years. I managed to liberate many dozens of women's magazines held captive in the cupboard since the mid-90s, with one magazine (Best) having evidently been incarcerated since 1989. I was even joyously reunited with a Shoot magazine from 1988. The front cover of said magazine had the banner headline on the front cover: "Champions EVERTON", and below the title, on the right of a picture of Ian Rush playing for Juventus, we are teased by the intriguing words "Trevor Francis - Why he's angry".
Updates to follow on the rest of the de-cluttering project...
