Old Stuff

Some old things are, let’s face it, awful. I’m thinking of leftovers which have been in the fridge since, now let’s see, was it last Thursday – no we had chicken on Thursday, so it may have been Friday, or was it Wednesday – anyway, you think it might be bad so you have to resort to the old sniff test. But is it off or just ‘savoury’? So you call the spouse, the kids, and lastly, people walking past the house, before deciding that it’s probably OK and then tuck in. Two hours later you’re in the smallest room cursing humanity’s lack of a decent nose, and vowing to date and label everything you put in the fridge. Other old things that don’t seem to get much love are magazines, newspapers, bent spoons, and Uncle Joe (the one that everyone agrees does smell off). They just make the place look untidy.

And so, we toss ‘em. If we are environmentally aware (and if you’re not, tut tut) we recycle them, but out they must go. And we do it with a grim determination. We have books, actual proper books with indexes and everything, telling us how to throw things out! I’ve even seen TV shows where stern faced women march into people’s garages and force them to throw out three quarters of what’s in there. Granted, the place looks much neater but I reckon there were harsh words uttered when the husband went looking for that bit of wire that was just the right length to keep the gate shut after the next-door neighbour’s tree fell on it.

Anyway, it seems to me that there is an altogether too hasty rush to throw out stuff that might, one day, be quite a remarkable bit of gear. We do keep lots of stuff – children’s drawings, photos and official certificates are high on the list – but, and I need to be careful here, there are only so many random crayon scratches marked “Spider, by Sophie aged 14 months” the world needs.

What the world will need is the stuff currently sitting in a box at the back of your garage, hiding in fear from stern faced TV women. A Rat Sac box from the 1960s, an ‘original Frisbee disc’ from your summer of love back in ’73, two cricket balls from the now defunct factory at the end of your street. Who keeps these things? In a hundred years will museums be full of nothing but bits of paper announcing that young Joshua can swim 20 metres without sinking to the bottom of the pool? They might be.

All this came from a school group I toured through Museum the other day. I’d shown them most of the impressive stuff, huge wagons, bright red army jackets, shiny machinery, when I stopped beside a case with a few bricks and a brick mould. The mould was used to make some of the 60,000 bricks used for Cockleshell Corner, built in 1911. It’s just a few bits of wood, fairly dull to look at, but what a find it is. How many brick moulds survived their working life? How many were used until they fell apart and then put on the fire? Of the thousands of moulds used across this land over the past two hundred plus years how many remain? Not many I’d guess. And the sad thing is that the others were thrown out, deliberately, and with forethought of malice (as TV judges tend to say) on to the (ahem) ‘scrapheap of history’.

So before throwing out that old toy, or newspaper, or frisbee just think about what the world might be missing if you do.

And one more thing, that bacon in the fridge, behind the milk – it’s off. Give it to the dog.

This post first appeared in The Daily Liberal on 20-12-2008.