What I’ve Kept

There’s a fine line between collector and hoarder and it’s easy to drift between the two. I like to think (with a reasonably healthy dollop of self-delusion and self-justification) that I veer more into the collector arena as I will go through and purge from time to time. Also, the stuff that I do have is generally kept ordered and accessible within my own careful system of organisation (alphabetically for DVDs and BluRays; a slightly more arcane system based on author, genres, book size and eye-pleasingness for books).

There are occasionally some little oddities that turn up from time to time as well as outliers of hidden untidiness.

Tickets & Programmes
Sometimes, I find things from events, etc. that I’ve been too. Last year, I came across a large envelope containing a site map, lanyard, programme of events, souvenir magazine and newspaper cuttings all from the first Glastonbury I went to back in 2005. I’d never been overly fussed about festival going before but, with my 30th birthday fast approaching, it suddenly leapt up to being one of those things that I wanted to do before I was 30.
Also, pretty much every BFI screening and event which I go to gives you a lovely little fact sheet to accompany it - I keep this along with the ticket in a folder. Will I ever go through and read them again? Hmmm, it’s possible that this one strays into hoarder territory but it is very tidy hoarding.

MiniDisc Player & MiniDiscs
Hey, MiniDiscs are the future. Well, at least, they were for about a week in 2000 and then iPods came out and they were instantly old and clunky. I absolutely loved my MiniDisc player. In fairness, I’ve partly kept it as it has some audio sketches and documentaries that I created at university (which I haven’t got around to digitising) but mainly it’s because MiniDiscs are cool and you know they are so shut up.

Drawer O’Cables
You start off with good intentions. You carefully loop the cables (maybe even using cable ties to keep all nice and stuff), you keep them grouped according to function, you determine that you will only use that drawer for cables and nothing else. Two weeks later, you look in it and it’s now a wildly overgrown wire jungle with outliers of shoe polish, spare toothbrush heads and hastily shoved in the drawer credit card statements. You genuinely have no idea how this happened.

Old Shoes
I never used to have many pairs of shoes. Being a former shoe salesman and man of very wide feet, shoe shopping is not something I like to endure. The modern word has removed a lot of that shoe shopping pain. I’ve found an online store with decent but affordable shoes in my size which I have no need to try on. As such, the bottom of the wardrobe now has a layer of shoes at the bottom which are not worn and gradually being compressed into something resembling a geological layer*.

I know that a lot of these things should just be thrown away. I should not just be beholden to the tyranny of stuff. I know that they should be disposed of.

That SCART lead might come in handy, though...

* In a similar way to the planet of Brontitall which passed the Shoe Event Horizon in the second radio series of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (I am a nerd; these are my reference points).