Andrew Kay: Cut backs
I’m having a cull. Changes in my circumstances have meant a major rethink and in turn I have been taking stock of my life.
It started, as so many things do, in the pub. I was drinking cocktails in Kemp Town with my food festival chums and wondering what to do with my vast collection of possessions. Their response was almost unanimous – “Sell them,” they cried.
It was not what I wanted to hear. After so many years of collecting things (for collecting, the cynical amongst you may wish to substitute the word hoarding) the idea of flogging off my world goods and chattels is not appealing. After all, I have over the years already shed a host of treasured goods in my many moves and in random acts of generosity.
“I purchased some pitta bread and taramasalata in the crazed belief that it would balance out the quantity of booze that I had downed”
I staggered home later that night after far too many cocktails. I was rather impressed by the fact that I did this by bus and managed to stop at a local convenience store where I purchased some pitta bread and taramasalata in the crazed belief that it would balance out the quantity of booze that I had downed.
Once in the flat I sat, toasted pitta and pink slurry on my lap – on a plate of course – and surveyed my world. It’s a complex mix of beautiful things and crazy stuff that carry so many memories. The paintings and prints alone would bewilder most householders, but when you add to that a vast collection of ceramics the prospect of starting to rationalise them kick-starts a kind of fear that only a collector on the brink of down-sizing might feel.
In addition to this there is the huge library of theatre programmes going right back to my late teens. A record of my love of the theatre and a testament to my very catholic tastes. Then there are the boxes of CDs, never listened to these days, but kept just in case… well, just in case.
Did I mention the clothes? I know I have before. So many clothes, so many. I opened a wardrobe door and took a look. Very soon I realised that they were not all mine, some of them had been abandoned, rather a lot in fact.
A light came on in my head, this was the obvious place to start. I went through to the kitchen, another area of over indulgent hoarding I confess, and fished out a roll of big black bin bags. Back at the wardrobe I started to cull, filing what was not mine into the black sacks and what was mine but was no longer the right size into a pile for recycling. I later took a very old Levi’s jacket to a charity shop and was amazed at how pleased they were to be given something that they described as vintage. I hadn’t considered that some of my wardrobe is so elderly that it now qualifies for the very fashionable vintage tag. Maybe I should have kept it. No, maybe not, after all, this was an exercise in reduction.
A couple of hours later I had reduced the contents of three large cupboards to one and the piles of black sacks in the hall was so big that people wishing to raise moneys for charity might consider climbing it as a cheap alternative to Kilimanjaro. What is all that about anyway? Why go so far when you could mount the Great Orme or Snowdon or lie in a bath of baked beans for a few hours? I digress.
There’s a long way to go. I need to cut down my kitchen ware, reduce my glassware and crockery, and even take that advice and sell some stuff. Would anyone be interested in a pair of size 11 Doc Marten’s – in bright orange?
