Inception

Well, we moved onto The Quay on 20th March 2025 after living for over 40 years in Frome in Somerset. It was quite a transition from a large four bedroomed house built in 1867 with a large garden and 4 decades of clutter to a second floor apartment on a Quayside in Dartmouth with no clutter. Well almost. There were a few things that we could not part with and that small collection of things came with us.

We couldn't bear to leave these guys behind

It was quite an experience, getting rid of so much that we had held dear for so long. Much of it went 'on the wall' as we put it. Anything small enough to sit on our front wall went out there.

Over a period of about six months we had moved pretty much the entire contents of our loft through the house, onto the wall and then into the new owners car or carried off in their arms. Death cleaning, the Swedes call it and I guess that is what it is. We have at least spared our offspring the bitter sweet experience of sorting out the belongings post mortem.

More Brio trains

From a purely personal point of view I think that we both found the action quite enlightening in most senses of the word. The sheer weight of having two huge prams in the loft; the boxes upon boxes of clothes ; treasure chests of lego; almost all the large activity Playmobil sets that were around when our children were growing up; more Brio train sets than you could count. It all went.

One last fossil - a doorstop

Even my library and my collection of fossils ( admittedly they went to one of our grandsons). The books went in a mixture of ways: gifts to second hand book sales; some, I'm afraid, went

to the local recycling; some on the wall to avid readers. St Augustine's, De Civitas Dei went to a retired Anglican clergyman just up the road. It was a sad series of days that they went, I have to say. Now I have a small but select collection of about 10 books, plus my own scribblings and about 15 cookery books that I was unable to part with.

The learning that we took from that experience was probably as follows.

Firstly, they are only possessions - it's just 'stuff' - and let's face it none of it is going with us when we take the final journey in this life. Secondly, it was helpful to gift things rather than sell them. That way we felt that we hadn't crystalised a loss but had contributed to other peoples lives. Thirdly there was a kind of symbiosis thing going on. We had a number of small chicken houses that were fit for burning along with a couple of old water tanks that were littering up the garden . Not to mention two survivors of our great chicken experiment, two unnamed hens that still occasionally provided us with eggs.

The great chicken experiment

These all went at no cost to us and at considerable value to him, to a local gypsy who in the end proved to be very resourceful in removing unwanted things from our garden (with our blessing). The hen houses he tidied up; the water tanks went to store water for his goats; the hens went to live out their old age in his garden.

Finally, we got the chance to hand things over to our kids in their lifetime without the difficulty of bereavement (for them) or the risk of quarrels over the spoils.