Time for a national de-cluttering

Bill Jamieson has a clear-out at home and suggests Scotland may find catharsis in a similar process

Across the land, the wheelie bins are filled to overflowing and trailers trundle to join the queues at recycling centres. After five months mostly confined to our homes and dependent on a flow of Amazon boxes for everyday needs, the urge to de-clutter has become a national obsession. Where to start? When will we ever finish?

Visits to my local recycling centre in the Trossachs have seen long snaking queues of cars and vans packed with household detritus. It has become a rite of passage for the modern home. How easy it is for us to acquire stuff – and how difficult to discard it!

I made several visits last week and, on each occasion, had to wait with mounting impatience as van-loads of old furniture, white goods, carpets, toys, electrical equip - ment, bags of clothes, knick-knacks, ornaments and all manner of bric a brac were hauled out and carted up to the bins. The problem has been compounded by the closure or partial operation of charity shops due to coronavirus restrictions.

As I waited, I thought many of the loads in front of me were, surely, trade waste and impermissible in the household queues. But at last, I came in sight of the giant yawning bins of household discard and experienced the final triumph of the clearing purge.

But by far the most difficult part is not the final tipping but what to keep and what to bid farewell. Hours are spent in dither and indecision. Family rows break out as longforgotten items squeezed into a choc-abloc upstairs cupboard are rediscovered as treasured family heirlooms – yes, the very ones we had packed out of sight for years.

Items with broken handles, once-favourite chairs with worn arms, gadgets that could be repaired if only we had the time, and favourite books we allowed to gather dust on bookshelves – why did we keep them all? Why do we so baulk at letting go?

Last week I stared with total defeat on a wall of once indispensable files. Tax records have to be kept for six years for the sole benefit of the taxman. But all the earnest Scottish government reports and eco - nomic publications over the years pointing the way to a golden future if only we had followed this strategy or that detailed plan?

I have records of former First Ministers’ speeches, a fine portfolio of abstruse, bewildering mind maps penned by former minister Jim Mather, and oh, the stacks of books and papers on devolution, maximum devolution, tomes on small country independence, business conference agendas, presentations, Andrew Hughes-hallett’s impenetrable Powerpoint print-outs, GDP data, trade statistics – all seized upon as ‘must keep’ at the time but the figures become so quickly out of date. So much effort, so much brainpower – and now fit only for the incinerator.

And what did I keep? Boxes crammed with calling cards, menus from official dinners (ah, yes, the dinners!), award ceremonies, even lanyards kept as if valuable souvenirs of a conference half attended and long forgotten.

Oh, and did we not keep all those calling cards – that hallowed corporate ritual of ‘Give me a call’ but soon out of date as folk move jobs?

But that’s not the worst of it. After hours clearing out a box beneath the study table, what did I retain? Important Holyrood reports? Transformative studies by Andrew Wilson? No – out to the fiery dustbin. Instead I keep favourite birthday cards with pussy cats, virgin, unused corporate notebooks, smart biros from investment houses long vanished. Oh, and programmes for the local Highland Games and the sheep shearing scores.

Arguably of no possible use whatever, a voluminous 40-page typed record of all my roses at Inverogle, their performance tracked every year: “best blooms yet”, “succumbed to black spot”, “must replant and spray” and “gave up the ghost”.

I had more than 60 different roses in the garden and I loved them all. Our hobbies and passions define us – but in the end even here, too, the agony of letting go must be faced.

Inside and out, some 20 years of accumulated treasure and throwaway have to be sorted out and the house cleared for total redecoration and returned to something like its pristine state. And when all the clutter has gone, how many of the items that we cascaded into those giant Callander recycling bins do we miss? After two days, let me tell you: not one.

The house will now be made ready for a fresh start and a new era. And as with our homes, so arguably with the country. There is much we care for and to which we will cling for as long as we can. But the past is another country. And as the pandemic subsides and we struggle to start again, decluttering will be central to its cathartic, and purging legacy.