Cleaning up is cold comfort

Subconsciously, or unconsciously, I equate the dismal weather with the gloomy scene facing me in the hoarding precinct.

Nothing can be less attractive than half-empty paint cans and brushes left to harden with last year’s pink used on flower pots.

If that’s not enough, bottles and spray cans half-filled with poisons to attack armies of ants, cockroaches, mosquitoes, flies and snails, line buckling shelves.

And why would I have kept used brake pads after the last service on the X3?

Perhaps at the time I thought of donating them to taxi owners whose vehicles made do with cardboard cuttings.

And what of boxes and boxes of computer cabling and plugs collected over the years?

Never could understand the necessity for these extras. Perhaps that’s why my computers often give me rude signs.

Then there’s bulging suitcases filled with old shoes, boots, broken cricket bats, parts of a vacuum cleaner, old Tupperware lids, chipped glasses and cups – and an empty wine bottle.

But, in mitigation, they don’t belong to us, but to younger brat and his family who left us this legacy after moving abroad.

My Heidi says we must keep them in case they come back home.

To do what with, I ask you. Added to this unsightly list are old garden tools stuck with rust – so, unusable. Baskets.

All shapes and sizes. They had their uses – for florists. The only way to deliver flowers for Mother’s Day, Women’s Day, anniversaries and birthdays, is by way of a basket. Fused globes. Hundreds of them.

They’ll never light up our lives, but there they are, taking up space. Next to them is another box. Batteries. AAs, AAAs, A1s, A3s.

All dead as doornails. After a hard look at this unwanted paraphernalia I decide, with frozen hands, to do a complete overhaul.

I find four biggish empty boxes and proceed to do a proper dumping job. The shelves are now empty and spotless.

No evidence of the hideous horde. After mopping the floor with Jeyes Fluid and vinegar, oily and moldy smells disappear.

Now to find packing space for four boxes.

Cliff Buchler.

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