This last week I have been flat-out getting things organised for my move north. I have made calls to rival removalist companies, met with my accountant, got my mortgage re-financed, corresponded and spoken with sundry companies and people. I have painted and grouted, I've hammered at walls trying to remove stubborn tiles, cleaned up again and again. My hands had been covered in cuts, nicks and abrasions. Once they were stained green from the pigment I had put in the grout. Today there are flecks of grey paint on them. My back has ached, my arms grown heavy, I have lifted myself from tiredness to complete what I have started at the end of a long day.
I have also begun going through my cupboards and drawers, sorting things through and filling rubbish bags with items I wondered why I had ever kept. Today I went through a box I had not opened for years. Inside it was full of manila folders containing notes, stories, letters; and foolscap pads with scribbled thoughts on them. Like often in these circumstances I stopped to read what I had put away and what I had written when I was a much younger man.
Much of it was embarassing now. I read things which seem artless and superficial, but in reading them had fond memories for the man I was then, in the knowledge of who I have become since, and of the road that has led me here. Other things I read surprised me in other ways - they were quite good. I read lists I had composed at one workplace or another, doodling perhaps while I was on the phone. One was a list of women I had known, names with little comments against them. I smiled reading them, recalling most, but felt some shock also when I realised that some of the names are now utterly foreign to me, and their faces seemingly lost forever. I didn't know what to make of that. I read letters I had written, knowing I never intended to send them - all to women, naturally, all to exes. And folded in amongst the assorted papers was a letter my grandmother wrote to me. She has been dead 5 years or more now, and the letter was written several years before that. I read it, sadly, seeing in it the dementia that took her in her final years - once she had been an intelligent, strong woman.
It's strange how you come across things like that. I wonder if in years to come I will revisit some of my early posts here and shake my head at them. Probably - I already shake my head at some. I'm only halfway through the box, and though I'll go through it completely I doubt anything will be thrown out. I am a hoarder, and I have always tended to record my thoughts and observations on paper - and I am glad of it. Coming upon a box like that is like opening a time capsule and seeing a different self, and looking around at a different, earlier, world. It is like domestic archaeology, the deeper into the box I go the further into the past I travel, and the different strata of my life and times revealed.
