Hoarding...not just on TV

Byatt

GQ, slightly OT, but what did your mum and dad say about the fire on Jersey?

GreyQueen

Byatt wrote: »

GQ, slightly OT, but what did your mum and dad say about the fire on Jersey?

Turns out whilst I was ringing their hotel's Reception, they were in said hotel's dining room having a lovely meal.:o

Their hotel was over a mile away from the area which was cordoned off although at some point they did see the flames coming from the side of the gasometer, which is not something you want to be seeing in an ideal world! They were out on a Jersey-wide coach excursion that day and didn't get back to the hotel until quite late in the day.

Feel a bit of a fool for getting all worked up...........:o Jersey's lovely apparently. I did tease them that it's about exactly the same size as Provincial City but they said it seems bigger as it has fields in it............:rotfl:

Byatt

GQ, I've been to Jersey, lovely place.:) No reason to feel a fool, you didn't know they were safe and sound or how bad things were. :A Glad they enjoyed it though. I remember eating lots of Jersey cream teas as I wanted to know if they were better than the South Wests...:D

GreyQueen

Byatt wrote: »

GQ, I've been to Jersey, lovely place.:) No reason to feel a fool, you didn't know they were safe and sound or how bad things were. :A Glad they enjoyed it though. I remember eating lots of Jersey cream teas as I wanted to know if they were better than the South Wests...:D

I had to similarly cross-check the ice cream in Italy with my memories of the ice cream on the Isle of Man to make sure where it ranked in the list of lusciousness.

Being as wot I am an international travelling gor-may, I have to know these things, right?

katep23

Calicocat, well done on the giving up smoking - keep it going :T

Well, productive day here. Wanted to get ottoman put together but beforehand I wanted to "sort the bedroom out". Cue pulling the bed out to see what was underneath (don't ask ), cleaning the carpet, steam cleaning the mattress, washing the sheets and line-drying which I love and even hoovering the lampshade :rotfl:

It smells so fresh in here now (even better when I put the sheets back on the bed!) and we have moved most of the carp out so will sort it out before deciding what to bring back in - only "stuff with a home" shall cross the threshold.

Have found quite a quantity of empty jewellery boxes - didn't know I owned that much bling! Might freegle them, any other ideas?

Also sorted out the cupboard under the sink aand put everything in baskets so I can now see what is there - which is 6 bottles of dettol spray, 2 bottles of black polish / scuff cover, umpteen scoury pad things and over 100 jay cloths :eek:

Ah well, am about to reward myself with a bath, taking a bottle of wine and Jack Reacher for company - Byatt, am sure you will approve

Byatt

GQ, definitely, although I am jealous now, as I've not been to Italy but so want to. My DD has been to Venice. She adored it.

Kate, Jack's with you?! (which title is it?)

I've done nothing decluttering wise but have been working which involves a lot of car driving, plus being a taxi service for DD this weekend.

I want to do something in the garden tomorrow as I have lots of plants that need potting.

katep23

Byatt - I've got him until tomorrow then he goes back to my sister (or my dad :eek: - shared library book ).

I'm reading The Affair, got about 150 pages to go and need to finish it by tomorrow afternoon!

calicocat

Thanks KATIEP.........the flat smells so much better already ! Not that I really smoked that much (around 10) and only smoked in the kitchen , it obviously permiated through the whole flat.

I am thinking about this whole hoarding thing........is this something that has always gone on ? Or is it something we have seen happening over say the last 40 years ? I am wondering about it as society goes thrrough different stages which produces different behaviours in people.
Or....is it just that it is brought to out attention these days through media which it wasn't before ?

If it is a fairly recent thing (last 40 years or so) what is different in society now to precipitate this ? Is it that people can be a lot more isolated now ? People have all sorts of ways of communicating now, which can mean very little physical communication in person. Years ago I think there was much more of a sense of community.....so would the feelings that lead to this be nipped in the bud before it got a hold ? Therfore the negative affect of trauma were more diluted ?

Sorry , got my analytical head on today !..........and I was just thinking that I didn't hear of this say in my grannies day....everything was 'ship-shape' and organised.

Hope this makes sense to people ??........it does to me at least:rotfl:

GreyQueen

Calicocat, I think some of it is psychology and a lot of it is opportunity.

My Mum and Dad's generation, the people who are around 70 now, grew up in an era when plastics were in their infancy. If you had a plastic doll when Mum was a girl it was a rare thing and a horrible brittle plastic which would shatter if dropped. A lot of the stuff which forms a substantial part of modern hoards simply didn't exist.

Just think about the wonderful potential for hoarderish persons of two items; the margarine tub and the ice cream tub. Marg has been around since the late 19th century but it, like butter, was always packed in paper. Even in my girlhood, you bought ice-cream in blocks in cardboard packaging. Nearly everyone would have had an open fire and a lot of this stuff would have been burned, either as a means of getting the kindling alight or as a way of disposing of it once the fire was going.

In the cottage where I was born, the only water supply was a cold tap at the kitchen sink. If you wanted a modest amount of hot water, you used a kettle. Anything greater, such as doing the laundry or enough water to fill the tin bath, and you fired up "the copper".

For those who have never heard of these, this would have been a built-in feature of the kitchen or of the wash house adjacent; essentially a waist-high structure housing a tank with a grate underneath and an chimney flue. You filled the copper with water with a bucket and then lit a fire underneath to heat it. You couldn't bathe in the copper (metal not strong enough) but you did use it for washing clothes etc and to heat water for other purposes such as bathing.

This was only in the 1960s btw, but we were in a country area and probably a bit backwards. My Nan's council bungalow (built early 1950s) has a "wash house" which still had it's copper in situ in my girlhood but the council removed it in the 1980s.

What Mum said about having a copper is that you burned everything, even old shoes, so there was never anything like that lurking around. What she also observed as that when she and Dad were young marrieds (early 1960s) you had to buy new stuff even if you were poor like them because there was very little secondhand stuff to be had, and what there was about, was absolute trash.

WW2 had cause production of many items to cease altogether, and was preceeded by the Depression, and people were much poorer. Mass production hadn't got started for most items and a lot of modern materials which have made things much cheaper, simply hadn't been invented. As a working teen, Mum had to buy a small transistor radio on hire purchase, it being such a relatively-expensive item! And an adult had to counter-sign the form.

If you look at pics of interiors even in the 1950s and 1960s, they are a lot more sparse than most modern homes.

I once saw a fascinating magazine article in one of the Sunday supplements contrasting how many clothes the average person of the 1920s would have owned compared to the 1990s. The visual of the few items on the clothes rails told it's own story.

In the home where my great-grands raised their 11 children, there were no such things as wardrobes. You kept your few items of clothing on hooks on the back of the door. When they grew up and the girls went away into domestic service, which was the norm for working-class girls from 14 until marriage, they bought themselves a cheap tin trunk (still a modest size) to hold their clothes. You can pick these trunks up singlehandedly.

So, nowadays, the opportunity to gather up excess materials is available to everyone, not just the rich eccentrics who might have hoarded in previous centuries. Add the this strong familial traits towards thriftiness and saving everything inc string and spare nails, against future need, and you have a perfect storm of hoarderism.

Perhaps the wonder is not that there are so many people hoarding but that there are not more people at it.

Byatt

GQ, thanks for saving me from thinking about Calico's post right now, totally DITTO all you said. The reason I am traumatised is because of a nightmare I've just woken up from, which included remarrying my ex :eek:, Armageddon in the form of appalling weather and landslides in which my DD was little, I found my ex (again) :eek: and we were trying to get home, despite people falling off cliffs, sleeping rough and eating old sandwiches we found. Last but not least, humungous slugs :eek: which made wonder how they managed to survive the rain and devastation. But survive they did! Even in Armageddon I was thinking, GQ was right, they are HUGE! :rotfl:

I am now exhausted and appalled. Not sure if any of it relates to my decluttering. :o