Soup on the other side....

  So, I'm looking around my little home, and you know what, there's a lot of stuff. Right now, there is not a cupboard that isn't fit to bursting with stuff, there's not a surface that doesn't have something on it, just hanging around, doing what stuff does. All my bookcases are crammed with books, double layers of books I might add, with more books on top of them. I think I need to have a sort out, but actually sorting out stuff is really tricky. For some reason I can always find a reason to keep something, you know, because you never know when that book that identifies insects of the world might be handy, and everyone needs 3 sets of cooking pans right?

  It's scary how much you accumulate over the years, when I first moved down here I really didn't have that much, just a van load at best, but now, well, now it's a beast. Admittedly some of it is someone else's stuff as well but still, a large proportion of it is mine, and its growing. Lets take clothes for instance, I have lots of stuff I will never wear, I have some fancy stuff I've never actually worn, which is pretty shameful really, but it's still just sitting there, waiting to be worn in some hypothetical, and unlikely scenario possibly involving an art gallery opening and Johnny Depp dressed as a pirate.

   Why is it so hard to get rid of stuff? Maybe, it's because there's so much of it? or maybe it's the emotional attachments we place on things, I know a lot of it is exactly this with me, learning to attach the emotion to the memory rather than the item is really hard. The thing is, more often than not, if I really do need the thing I've got rid of, chances are I can just get a replacement relatively easily somewhere out there, especially now we have the internets, which coincidently is so much a doubled edged sword. In fact, I would say a large proportion of recentish stuff is from there in some way, especially when it comes to books, DVDs and the like, which appear to be doubling in size every time I look at the moment, like some sort of literary bacterial culture in the Petri dish of my flat.

  Oh stuff, you wrap your spiky tendrils round my heart, making it so hard to get rid of you, but i know that in the end, you have to go, cause slowly, very slowly, you're squashing the life out of me.....