Fifty years of stuff

<p>Something I couldn&#39;t bring myself to throw out five years ago is plainly junk now. The line separating nostalgia and rubbish is thin.</p><p>Every few years we wade through a sedimentary layer of crap in the Fink family home. We don&#39;t often make much headway, because the room is full of mementoes that span lifetimes. The trinkets in here go all the way back to Mum&#39;s childhood.</p><p>Mum&#39;s uncle Noel, who lived to 99 and ten months, had a framed letter from Winston Churchill. Amazing. Also useless.</p><p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/#"><strong>Col</strong></a> and I had different feelings about the family home after we moved out, but we&#39;ve landed in a similar place. Neither of us are attached to much there now, but there are some things we couldn&#39;t bear the thought of purging. A keepsake here, a handcrafted relic there. The rest could go tomorrow and we&#39;d never notice.</p><p>The trouble is, the room doesn&#39;t know that. So it sits there, holding fifty years of stuff hostage on behalf of the handful of things that still matter.</p><p>As he often does, David Whyte captures the feeling well:</p><p>&quot;Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past, nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end.&quot;</p><p>See you again in a few years.</p>