Me, aged about 18.

I have been quite busy over the last few weeks.  We have been doing a bit of decorating to make it more likely we will be able to move – and so that it is more pleasant to live if we stay here.  Before that I had to fill in the holes in the wall made by putting up shelves, but before that I had to take down the shelves and that meant emptying them of their bounty of books.  Quite a task really.

I have also been clearing out the loft and sorting the stuff into three categories – keep, take to the tip, and sell or give away.   I have been a bit of a hoarder over the last decade or two,  and found stuff in the loft that must have been moved there direct from my old loft ten years ago.  I have had to tell myself that if it has been up there for years without me missing it, then I probably don’t need it.

The exception might be photographs.I really thought that I had lost or disposed of most of my old photo albums, but found a load of them in a box with Jayne’s.  So far I have dug out a dozen of them.  I may return them to the loft, but not before scanning in some of the best (and worst) to share on Flickr and Facebook.  I have already found some quite interesting ones from when I was between about 16 and 18.

My interest was sparked when I found an official photo from an old schoolfriend’s wedding.  It was bride, groom, and the groom’s mates, most of whom went to school with us.  I remembered being at the wedding but couldn’t work out why I wasn’t in the picture.  Obviously not because I took it – it was an official one.   Then I realised that I was in it, but just hadn’t recognised my younger self.

I still can’t believe some of the hairstyles and clothes in those old pictures.

None of this has helped get the decorating finished, though it is coming along OK.  Tonight I tackled the technology graveyard and ended up with a box full of stuff that was once an exciting new toy but is now junk: the external DAT tape drive, the Zip drive, a Pentium MMX processor, several CD-ROM drives, ribbon cables, processor fans and modem cards.   I’m sure there is more still up there – I can remember a USB 1.0 hub which I haven’t come across yet.

Why did I keep all this junk?  I even have old car stereos from cars I sold more than five years ago. Did I think I might ever use them?

Anyway, I will have to step up the pace on the loft clearance now because it looks like we will be moving after all – out of Crawley completely.  Nothing signed yet, so it could all fall through like the last possibility, but fingers are all crossed.