Rainy Day Sort Out

Yesterday it rained, and it rained, and it rained. Water sloshed down the lane and swerved around the bend by our house, collecting and scattering small sticks and stones as it went. It dripped through the gap in our gutter, hitting the metal ladder below in percussion with the steady patter on the plastic corrugated roof of the lean-to. It rained all day and it was very welcome, for two reasons.

Firstly, the garden, always the garden. We are midway through planting out a mass of leggy seedlings, but we are terribly behind. So far, half the sweet peas are in, the strawberry foxgloves are settled and the broad beans and salad leaves have staked their claim to a raised bed. There are still trays of runner beans, chard, tomatoes and beetroot to go out which are tipping from perky to mournful so the downpour has cheered them up and softened the soil ready for planting.

The second reason we needed rain was because we had to go into the attic, an unattractive prospect at any time, but particularly in hot weather. If you have read my book you’ll know what this sort of mission can do for the state of our marriage. Arguments spout from nowhere, cultivated hothouse style under the warm eaves, resentments growing like mushrooms.

But we had no choice. We all had Stuff and we had to move it around, preferably from under our feet to over our heads and out of sight.

Earlier in the week, Raff and I had driven down to Falmouth to pack up his belongings from his second year house and drive it home, before we drive it back down to his third year house in September. It wasn’t too onerous because he travels pretty light. A box of kitchen equipment, a couple of rugs, a stool, an ammunitions box from a recent photoshoot, three pairs of white clogs and several custard yellow signal flags. That sort of thing. As a fashion student, the bulk of his stuff is clothes, bags of them, some gifted from recent work, a lot he had picked up in charity shops and online, all of them coming back home so he could sort through. Along with a lot of dirty laundry. And general rubbish which didn’t need a trip down the A30, but there we are.

Luckily for me, not only could I leave him with the car so he could load it up (I did offer, but he didn’t want my help, and I didn’t insist) I went to the wonderful bookshop in Falmouth where they have a workspace above their café. I rented a desk for the day at the grand sum of £12 which gave me an extension cable, a free flat white and the reassurance that I wasn’t going to lose hours of my deadline. It was a genius plan only slightly marred by a fellow hot desker on a loud zoom call who talked about ‘chewing through’ issues, ‘reaching out’, ‘deep diving’ and being ‘stuck in the weeds’. The last one I have adopted and will be using at every opportunity.

When I walked back up the hill at the end of the day to rendezvous with Raff, the car was packed and he appeared with a pile of admin and the scotch egg he hadn’t got round to eating for his lunch. We were both euphoric at our achievements. Me even more so when he said that on of his housemate’s parents had already taken three car loads of belongings up to London, hired a storage unit in Falmouth and were still midway through clearing two rooms. She and her boyfriend had managed to amass chairs, bookcases, a dresser, a lot of clothes… Let this be a lesson to you I said to Raff, on the benefits of travelling light through life. I sounded like I was the sort of enlightened person unencumbered by material things. Clearly not so.

When my dear friend Elaine and I lived together back in the 1990s, how readily we skipped to Golbourne Road every Saturday, returning with large objects sticking out of my tiny Renault windows and balancing a dolls house in a half closed boot. The dolls house was to put the television in which tells you everything you need to know about the size of our miniscule telly. We had a thing about finding large pieces of furniture that we were convinced were ingenious space saving ideas.

Privately, I thought Elaine had more of a hoarding issue than me, but when she moved out after five happy years to live with a (stinky) boy because they were in (yawn) love there were still a lot of things left behind that appeared to be mine. Then, I successfully bid for a table at auction that looked small in the warehouse before tripling in size when it arrived in my street. It was so big it couldn’t fit through the door. It sat in the front garden while I rang around trying to find someone to help me take the sash window out and lever the table into the house. I was convinced it would be taken, people in London naturally assuming that furniture left outside was fair game and an arrangement I had benefited from in the past. Unsurprisingly, everyone took one look at it (it stretched to over 7 feet long when fully extended) and walked on by.

It's taken several decades and the same number of house moves and lorries, but I have finally learned how to declutter, ditch and brutally discard, using the William Morris ‘useful or beautiful’ as a guide. I fantasise that our next move will be in a small van, me with a small box of breakables on my lap and a capsule wardrobe of clothes neatly folded in a suitcase.

We arrived back from Cornwall with many overflowing Ikea bags which were then distributed around the place as trip hazards, at the bottom of the stairs, on the landing, in his bedroom and still in the car. I drove them around all week before the rain came and we couldn’t delay the great sort out any longer.

This time I insisted on helping and it drew quite the crowd, the family gathering on the landing as we rifled through Raff’s collection, each of us hopeful for a cast off or to reclaim something that used to be ours. There were many pairs of old jeans, T-shirts with strange 70s logos, a pair of Swedish snow trousers, a variety of deerstalker hats, vintage Norwegian knits, French prisoner’s trousers found in Paris, a pile of white balaclavas and one tie. If anything takes your fancy, it will be coming to a Vinted and Ebay near you in the coming weeks.

Steve instilled a new rule about the attic, which is if we put something up there, then we have to bring something down and get rid of it. In my new improved minimalist frame of my mind, I was in full support so we managed not to bicker, even when Steve broke a lightbulb over his head. I think it was an accident and not a cry for help. And then he discovered a mouse had munched a hole in our tent before he knocked a box of camping equipment through the hatch, sending it crashing onto the landing. In spite of it all, we kept it together. “We are out of the weeds!” I said cheerfully to nobody.

Then the rain stopped so I got the dog out, which really meant getting myself out, and we went down to the sea to blow the actual cobwebs away, before returning for an earlier than normal Campari. I doubt anyone would argue with that.