My guilty secret

No, that's not right; "guilty" is the wrong word.  Perhaps "shameful" would be better, and I'm not sure that even that is the word I really want.  But whatever.

I have recently switched on the television a few minutes before the start of the programme I wanted to watch only to catch the last minute or so of a programme about people who are compulsive hoarders.  These people just seem to keep anything and everything, from newspapers to bottles, from bits of cars to . . .  well, anything at all, really.  It reminded me of the neighbours of my late mother.  He would go to car boot sales every weekend and bring back all sorts of rubbish which he stowed in cardboard boxes.  Those boxes filled the hallway so that people had to pass through sideways, lined the stairs and completely filled two of the three bedrooms.  In the front room there was a passage to one armchair (his) with a view of the television.  She had to sit in the kitchen.

And there, but for the grace of God, go I.  There, I've admitted it: I'm a hoarder.  I don't go out of my way to hoard things, but I have great difficulty in throwing away some things.  You know, that length of wood which might well come in handy one day, or the half a tin of paint which I might need to use to touch up whatever it was I used the paint on (only I've forgotten).  I put paintbrushes in jars of white spirit and then forget all about them but still don't get round to throwing them out.  And I must have hundreds if not thousands of odd screws - if only I knew where they are.

For some inexplicable reason, I never throw out a map.  OK, so maybe the reason is not quite inexplicable.  I like maps; I can spend many a happy hour with an atlas, exploring the world in my imagination.  But I really cannot see a lot of merit in still keeping a 1963 road map of France.  If it were just, say, Paris, it might be different.  After all, the streets in the centre of Paris, the part that tourists visit, are hardly likely to have altered their positions during the last 50 years, whereas new major roads, especially autoroutes (as the French call their motorways), are springing up all the time across the country.

And I have several CDs that I never play because I don't actually like the music on them.  So why do I insist on keeping them?  And all those tape cassette thingies?  I don't even have a working tape player now - unless, of course, there's one in the cupboard behind the armchair . . .

One of these days I really must take the bull by the horns and make a clean sweep of things (if you will pardon my mixing of thingummies).

Meanwhile, would anyone care to buy a pair of axle stands?  There's only a little rust on them.  Or maybe an Amstrad 1512 computer?

~~~~~

Casting my mind back to whenever, this is Ribeauville, a small town in Alsace, north-east France.