Exhumed

Yesterday morning, I aided Mither in clearing out her attic ahead of her forthcoming house move.

As I've mentioned in the past, my grandparents bought the house in 1963. What I haven't mentioned is that my Grampa was a hoarder - if he thought that something might prove interesting or useful in the future, he kept it.

A garage and garden shed full of 'useful' knick knacks have already been emptied. But it was the loft that was always likely to be the greatest challenge, for it was here that he squirreled stuff away, items that have been up in the rafters for 40 years or more.

And so it proved. Amongst the items we removed from the loft were an archaic set of wooden golf clubs, an eight-track tape player, 78rpm records, a projector screen, one headlight for an unknown vehicle, a tent, my Mither's dollys (Mither will turn 46 this year), 12 unopened bottles of wine, six dozen unused glasses too small to drink anything but neat spirits, a Dumbarton tourist brochure from the late 1960s, a 1978 World Cup commemorative edition of the Radio Times and a wooden crate bearing the legend "Corned Mutton - Product of Argentina".

That is merely a brief cross section of the 50 years of detrritus we removed from the loft yesterday. Also included amongst this interesting stuff were random pieces of copper pipe, assorted pieces of wood and boxes of tiles, some of them broken.

Some of the loot we removed from the loft has been retained, but most of it has now been discarded.

If there's an after life, I'm pretty sure that my Grampa is having a good laugh at us spending three days digging through the assembled flotsam and jetsam from three or four generations of my family.