MY GRANDPARENTS’ TABLE

I am, by nature, something of a hoarder. Oh, my life’s not quite got to the stage where I’m climbing over mountains of old newspapers in order to boil myself an egg (I’ve never been all that keen on eggs to be honest…) but there have been times when the occasional avalanche of tat has occurred, swiftly followed by a stream of expletives, and the feng shui in our tiny little house is never likely to exude a state of calmness and well-being.

However, in recent weeks we have come to a decision to “declutter” our little part of the world as best we can, which so far, as is perhaps the nature of such things, has led to exponential increases in the amount of clutter lying about the place as we churn it about to make space for the long-overdue building work to take place and address the damper and mouldier corners of our little hovel and try and restore harmony to at least bits of our lives.

The problem seems to be that in order to achieve this, you see, the first things that have to be got rid of are the very lumps of old furniture that a lot of the stuff was being kept in, and once you start putting your clothes into bags instead of drawers and wardrobes, the apparent clutter and sights guaranteed to make your eyes sore just seems magnified, even if it is only for a little while and that seeing it all like that reminds you that we all wear 20% of our clothes 80% of the time…

Anyway, today’s source of anxiety is that a charity are coming to whisk away the furniture that we have decide that we no longer need, and this is causing me a great deal of worry now that I’ve decided that they’re quite possibly not a charity at all, but an internet cover for some house-breaking scam and that they might bash me over the noggin and steal everything else at the same time.

Ah well, I’m sure I’ll find that out soon enough.

One of the items that I’ve finally been persuaded to part with is my grandparent’s old oak folding dining table which I’ve lived with for many years since I moved it into my little flat in the outer city back in the day.

It’s a bit huge for most of the spaces I’ve been able to afford to live in to be honest, and I ruined the surface of the centre section by watering “Ralph”, my late, lamented Boston Fern without putting a dish under it. Why I had a Boston Fern called “Ralph” is another story, which dates back to my college days and involves American exchange students not being able to take certain things back home with them and handing out bits and pieces like their plants to their neighbours before departure.

But enough about that, let’s get back to the matter in hand, namely that table. It had to go, of course, despite the fact that I worry that it’s going to turn out to be just the sort of antique that turns up on a TV “Roadshow” in a few years’ time and turns out to be worth an absolute fortune.

Nevertheless, I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that I have to let it go… but it is turning out to be something of a wrench…

(No, actually, it’s a table. If you think that’s a wrench, thank God you never became a plumber…)

But then, you see, that table has always been there. It stood in the dining room of “The Hawthorns”, the big detached house that my grandfather built in the 1950s, and it moved with then to the dining area of the bungalow which he built for their retirement in the 1970s and got to live an entire four years in before he died.

In my memory it seemed far longer.

All those family Christmases and Sunday lunches spent around the thing.

All of the laughter…

All of the rows…

They’re not always fond memories, but they are memories nonetheless.

After that house was sold and my grandmother moved into her last home, a tiny retirement apartment just down the road from us, she didn’t really have room for it, but it seemed so well made and expensive looking in comparison to anything that you could get from IKEA that it languished in our garage for a while before moving with me into my first home, and has been with me, folded and unused, ever since. Perhaps in the hope that one day it would go very nicely in the mythical “big house…”

So, you see, sometimes it’s just very difficult to bring yourself to part with things, no matter how ridiculous it might seem, because there’s an awful lot of personal history wrapped up in that old lump of carved wood.