Going through my old gallery a few days ago I realised that a load of the pictures on there were just clutter.
I had a page of pictures of an ex-girlfriend, pictures from the Bravo TV Dolls House webcam site, poor quality photos from a holiday in 1999.
I cleaned them out as I never look at them myself, and I doubt anyone else is interested either. Not that any of the rest of it is of much interest to other people anyway.
Why had I kept them? Some kind of insecurity about losing hold of the past, possibly. Frankly, the past wasn’t always that great, so better to let it go.
Memories will stay even if the digital images go away, and I’ll keep a lot of my old pictures as they have good memories, and some provide a useful way of people who knew me, finding me on the net.
My flat does tend to have rather a lot of clutter too. Old t-shirts from gigs that I really enjoyed, vinyl records that I never play, clothes that I don’t wear, videos that I never watch and books that I never read. I suppose that’s what ebay is for… to transfer some of this clutter into other people’s lives.
I’d really like to get by with only the stuff I really need (no one really needs five PDAs), but it’s such a wrench to get rid of things.
Maybe the whole “selling up and travelling” thing will break me of my hoarding habits.
I’ll certainly have to be careful about what goes into my rucksack. Electronic gizmos seem to be one area of concern:
* MP3 player spare battery and charger
* Digital Camera and charger
* PDA and charger
* Memory Stick USB adapter
* Gameboy SP games and charger
Naturally, every manufacturer makes their power connector different; only the MP3 player has anything like a standard connector on it, so I have to take a charger for each item. Fortunately, many now have chargers that connect to a 2-way figue-8 power cable, so I’ll be able to change plugs easily.
I suppose I should probably take some clothes, books and “useful items” (torches, Swiss Army penknife etc) as well.
Wow – I’ve obviously missed something somewhere: you “selling up and travelling” soon? I envy you.
Well, that’s the plan, but it does mean I have to a) get the wood floor replaced where it got damp and warped, and finish of the painting.
We should have that done fairly soon, though, and we can then putthe flat on the market. With any luck we should be able to leave the country after going to Glastonbury Festival in June.
Current thoughts are that we’ll get trains through to Moscow and then go on the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, and then on to Japan.