Home sweet home or is it? | Nicola Adam column

By the time you read this yours truly will hopefully have moved house despite lockdown and tackled the physical and psychological baggage and stress that comes with transplanting human beings from one location to another.

Considering we come into the world naked and with nothing and leave much the same, it is truly remarkable how much detritus a person can collect in a lifetime.

Much of it is possessions we acquire for our own essential comforts like furniture, clothes and other products. But an awful lot of it is possessions we have become attached for our emotional comfort. Then there is the stuff we just keep, for no apparent reason. For example those size eight jeans and the clothes airer than nobody has ever worked out how to assemble.

I already know I have hoarding tendencies. I can’t bear waste and hate to dispose of an item I or others may possibly, maybe, probably not, need in the future and I hate having to re-buy things. But I am also the depository for the family history archives. If it has someone’s name on it, or is imbued with any hint of nostalgia, I have it stocked away.

Having lived in my current home with its impressive storage capabilities for far longer than was ever intended, my inventory of sheer stuff is quite enormous and given Covid times, without actually throwing them in a skip, there are few ways to move stuff on via charity. So as I type I am sitting in a tiny room, hemmed in with boxes teetering precariously. If you hear words of a terrible box collapse tragedy, dear reader. I urge you to be kind to my memory.

Children’s books are a case in point. They were my childhood and many handed down from my mother and grandmother, their neatly scrawled names and dates adorning the inside covers and some with secrets tucked away.

A leaf here, a note there, a precious memory between the covers. Well-thumbed and unlikely to be wanted by even charity or my nieces and nephews, they fester in my loft and now need shifting to a house sans loft. Wish me luck. I’ll need it.