The end is in the beginning
– Samuel Beckett
Something had to be done. The symptoms were all there.
For a start, putting things down had become a time-consuming chore, attended by hesitation and exasperation.
The walking away afterwards bit would all too often be accompanied by the sound of something crashing to the floor, having been dislodged in the displacement caused by the aforementioned putting down.
To be blunt, we had fallen victim to creeping clutter, clutter bad enough to make life uncomfortable.
I could offer excuses and say we’ve been too busy over the past few weeks, rushing hither and thither full of seasonal bonhomie, to spend time on housework.
If we’d hosted some event we would have been forced to make the house presentable – probably creating hidden clutter –  but, for the lack of that, things just drifted.
No, that wouldn’t be the truth of it, which was that the process of clutter-fication stretched back much, much further than a couple of weeks. Some of the letters I filed during our tidy-up today were dated 2006.
We got stuck in for a couple of intense hours during which the question “Where are we going to put this?” came in a distant second to the question “Shall we throw this out?” (usually answered in the affirmative).
In a couple of weeks we’re going to be about as far away from home as we can get without taking astronaut training.
It’s comforting to know that on our return we’re not going to be crushed in an avalanche of rubbish.