New Year clear out

Over Christmas Andy and I got a lots of tat (a term of endearment for ‘bits’), in terms of gifts and our own purchases. This isn’t a bad thing per se, but in order to make room for the new tat we had to get shut of some of the old.

In our house, on the rare occasion we have a clear out this usually involves us just moving tat to one part of the house to another or in severe cases from one corner of a room to the one opposite. Sometimes things are lobbed into drawers – or filing cabinets.

Yesterday, we decided to clean out the said filing cabinets of any tat we don’t need any more. I’m more than a little alarmed at what we found; disturbed, even.

The following item harks back from my music journo days:

I’m not quite sure why I kept hold of this CD to be exactly, as it’s a terrible album (with cover to match). I do though find it a bit freaky that Kevin Rowland was on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny that evening. Spooky, much?

We also found – including lots of other somewhat aged crap – a lot of press photos of Merseyside band the Boo Radleys, my CSE and O Level certificates (including the slips of paper you get ‘on the big day’), three hole punches, a letter from the Dept of Transport where I worked until 1996 from that year telling me I and my colleagues would be losing our jobs, about 200 dried out felt tip pens, a bag of cat nip, lots of Coldplay promo CDs I kept in the hope they’d be worth something one day (they’re not), two cassette players, and a number of pink chic lit novels from when I wanted to be Marian Keyes*.

(*I still do)

For some reason, albums from Dusty Springfield, Abba and Public Enemy were nestled in the classical music wing of our record collection. They’ve now been returned to the general population.

Post clear out, we’ve got bin bags aplenty, too bad we weren’t organised enough to catch the Xmas bin collections this year. I guess we’ll just have to spread them out strategically over the coming weeks.

But, at least now we have LOADS of room for our new tat…

@cathbore