See the picture, ladies and gentlemen? That is the tidy corner of my spare room.

My name is Jay and I am a hoarder.

Yes, it’s sad but true. I’m what the MerryCans call a ‘pack rat’ and I keep stuff. All kinds of stuff.

We’ve lived in this house for fifteen years and it is stuffed with … stuff. Every room has clutter! Every cupboard and drawer is bulging! We have more storage space than the average small country, and it’s all full of stuff, and I hate it!

So, tell me - why? Why do I keep stuff that I know darned well I don’t want or need?

Well, for a start, um, someone else might find some of it useful some day (outgrown kids’ toys, superfluous kitchenware, curtains, bedlinens etc). Maybe. Especially the broken stuff. I mean, there are people out there just desperate for a Darth Vader with one leg missing, aren’t there?

Talking of which, I keep stuff because I’m sentimental. Outgrown kids’ clothes and toys and toddler drawings, ancient hippie jewellery from my youth, my wedding dress - which wasn’t even a proper wedding dress, being home-made by my neighbour from white cotton seersucker - hospital bracelets from when the kids were born, everything with any kind of fond association, which is …good grief, pretty much 90% of what I own.

To be fair, some of the stuff is still here because I collect it - pressed glass jugs, Depp memorabilia and magazines, movie posters, photographs, holiday souvenirs, greyhound collectibles, etc. That’s legitimate stuff, right?

Maybe another reason I keep stuff is because I think I might be able to sell it for cash in my old age. I know I’m pretty hopeful here, since the house isn’t full of antiques or original art or anything - it’s just random bits and pieces which don’t fit into my current collections, like, my old childhood stamp album for goodness’ sake!

Then there’s the stuff I keep because I have no idea what the fuck to do with it- stuff which I don’t want but isn’t worn out and no other bugger wants it, either. F’rinstance, an old Bronica with a ton of accessories, and a very bad portrait of OH’s brother. Yes, that’s the portrait in that photo up there, and he didn’t really look much like that.

I also keep stuff because I think I might want it at some point in the future - clothes that I’ve outgrown (in both directions), kitchenware, games, books … oh, I’ll just catalogue the house for you, shall I? Hang on, shouldn’t take more than a year or two. Shall I make you a cuppa?

Every so often, I have an attack of sanity and start sorting. Over the years, this has resulted in the relocation of an awful lot of stuff, but very little reduction in quantity. I’ll get started, all enthusiastic, and find that I can’t bear to throw the stuff out, so I make piles. There’s the pile which is intended for the charity shop, the one for long-term storage, the one to sell or put up on Freecycle, and the one to offer to the kids, friends, various relatives, or anyone stupid enough to take it from me and swear that they really, really want it.

And then I get interrupted or disheartened or tired and I stuff each pile in a separate box and, well, store it somewhere. Usually on top of something else. See that picture up there?

Sometimes I panic that the house will catch fire and all my stuff will go up in flames, and of course, part of me would be wringing my hands and freaking out at the loss of it all, but a tiny cowering-in-the-corner-with-a-box-over-its-head part of me would be secretly relieved, because all of this worrysome stuff would be gone.

I have four sewing machines, for fuck’s sake - two of them broken, and one so ancient that it has long outlived its usefulness … but … but …well, it’s pretty, and it reminds me of my childhood!

Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi!

Today, I’m going to start de-cluttering. Again.

Wish me luck, fellow bloggers - and may the Force be with me.

It’s the stuff of nightmares, I tell you.

Chain letter emails. Who likes them? C’mon, hands up! Anyone?

OK, now, be honest - how many of you hate the damn things but still pass them on?

Uh-huh. I thought so.

Yesterday, I checked my email, and there, nestling among the spam and the offers to enlarge my non-existent penis, was a message of a different sort. This was even less fun than the invitations to take out life insurance, because this was one of those evil chain letter emails that play on your worst fears and warn you of the dire things in store should you be foolish enough to even think about not passing it on to everyone in your address book, plus their brothers, their second-cousins twice removed, and the postlady’s husband.

The grammar and punctuation are bad, the spacing is worse - I counted over twenty line-breaks between one line of the ‘poem’ and the next - and the general tone is threatening. It is not remotely funny or clever, as you might expect from a spoof chain letter. This is the real deal, and they’re like viruses, these things. They’re very irritating and they have a way of causing damage and infecting others.

In this one, there are three ‘true’ case histories. In the first, a young woman goes out to lunch with her boyfriend. He proposes, she accepts. Then she goes back to work, presumably walking on air and wrapped in a pink fluffy cloud of happiness. When she gets back to work, she finds an email - this very email - waiting for her, and she deletes it without following the instructions and forwarding it to the whole world and her sister. Needless to say the boyfriend gets hit by a truck and killed.

In the second, a young woman gets the email and tries to complete the instructions, but doesn’t have five email buddies to send it to, so she fails to do it right. She goes out that evening and gets killed by a hit and run driver - even though she did her best. Poor soul.

The third example is young man who reads it diligently, and forwards the email to the required number of people - and all within 45 minutes! My, what a fine young man he must be!

Anyway, shortly afterwards, this fine young man is on his way to a Very Important job interview with a Big Company, when he meets the Secret Love of his Life. She confesses to him right there on the street that she has a Secret Crush on him and three days later they get married and have three children. Quick work, huh? My, what a fine young man! I don’t know what happened about the job, but I bet he got it. Probably Managing Director by now, I shouldn’t wonder.

So, I bet you’re curious, aren’t you? I bet you want to read this poem to see what is so earth-shatteringly important that the author will resort to threats and intimidation to get his work circulated.

Are you ready?

> Around the corner I have a friend,

>
> In this great city that has no end,

> Yet the days go by and weeks rush on,

> And before I know it, a year is gone.

> And I never see my old friends face,

> For life is a swift and terrible race,

> He knows
> I like him just as well,
>

>
> As in the days when I rang his bell.
>
> And he rang mine but we were younger then,
>
> And now we are busy, tired men.
>
> Tired of playing a foolish game,

> Tired of trying to make a name.
>
> ‘Tomorrow’ I say! ‘I will call on Jim

> Just to show that I’m thinking of him.’

> But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes,
>

> And distance between us grows and grows.
>
>
> Around the corner, yet miles away,
>
>
> ‘Here’s a telegram sir,’ ‘Jim died today.’
>
> And that’s what we get and deserve in the end.
>
> Around the corner, a vanished friend.
>
> Remember to always say what you mean.
>
> If you
> love someone, tell them.
>
> Because when you decide that it is the right time it might
>
> be too late.
>
> Seize the day. Never have regrets.
>
> And most importantly, stay close to your friends
>
> and family, for they have helped
>
> make you the person that you are today.
>

I’ve left in some of the multiple spacing, so you get an idea just how horrible this thing is, but I’ve reduced it to save your sanity.

Now, the ‘poem’ contains some good sentiments, but overall, this email is just plain nasty. There is no outright threat, but the clear implication is that if you do not forward it to a whole bunch of people without taking too long to think about what you’re doing, you are in deep shit and will probably be run over by a truck. It is spam, ladies and gentlemen, but of a particularly insidious kind, playing on people’s fears and superstitions.

As it happens, I’m going to the dentist in the next few weeks to get my mouth checked, not only for holes in my teeth, but to make sure my oral cancer hasn’t returned. I also have several friends in bad health right now, and others with serious relationship difficulties. There’s a recession looming. I have a very fragile, elderly dog, and a very fragile elderly mother who lives alone, and I’d say that most people can write a similar list, and there’s a terrible compulsion to do anything and everything short of ritual sacrifice to make sure all goes well and stays well when we have health fears and loved ones to protect.

But I would ask you all to consider whether you should be forwarding this garbage to other people who might be frightened or intimidated by it. Or would you be better just to do as I do and say ‘Fuck it’?

I can tell you one thing. If I get run over by a truck tomorrow, it won’t be anything to do with this email - unless I were so rattled that I’m thinking about it instead of concentrating on looking both ways when I cross the road.

Oh, and by the way, this thing reminds me of Jack Sparrow in a way. You know that bit in Pirates of the Caribbean where Jack’s talking to some fellow prisoners about the legend of the Black Pearl?

One of them says to Jack ‘They say it leaves no survivors!’

And Jack grins. ‘No survivors! Then where do the stories come from, I wonder?’

Do you suppose the unfortunate young ladies in those first two stories left a note?

Today I took the Princess for another of her longer walks, but this isn’t going to be a post about the beauty of the countryside or the pleasure I took in the exercise, or, indeed, her company. This is a small rant.

Coming back through the village at a smart pace, we came up behind a couple of very young women, one with a child in a buggy, and the other with a small white dog on the end of a longish lead. The Princess was behaving impeccably (thank you, sweetie!) but we crossed over to the other side of the road because I could see that the little chap ahead of us was not under much control.

He was a rather nice looking half-grown crossbred, with a fair bit of Jack Russell in him by the look of things, and he was bouncy and interested in everything. He was wearing a harness, which was fortunate for him, because the young woman on the other end of the lead was not paying him any attention at all. Every so often he’d make a little detour onto the grass verge to sniff, but just as he got his nose down, there’d be a sharp jerk as he got to the end of his rope, and he’d be forcibly dragged along and he’d have to do a little skip to avoid being tumbled, end over end. This was happening because his owner had not paused or slowed, or even noticed what he was doing.

The Princess and I were walking a little faster than they were, so we drew closer and the little white dog noticed us and got excited and started to yap in our general direction. This got him his owner’s attention. She whipped round sharply, hauled on his lead until his front legs were six inches off the ground and yelled ‘Pack it in’ into his shell-like ear. Then abruptly turned and carried on walking and chatting to her companion. This happened two or three times, until she got really angry with him and practically swung him on the end of the lead while telling him she’s had quite enough and was sick and tired of him and did he want her to give him one? Then she let him go and he dropped to the ground and shook himself, by which time she was already several paces ahead and once again, he got a sharp jerk and had to do his little skip to avoid falling over.

She didn’t actually hit the little guy while I was watching, but clearly it was part of her repertoire and it made me very sad. You can do far more with positive training than by smacking your dog round the head if he upsets you. The Pirate was extremely vocal when we first got him because he hadn’t met any dog that wasn’t a greyhound for a very long time and he got excited when he saw one, even in the distance. But with time and patience and a bag of treats, he learned that when he did see another dog he was only allowed to actually get close if he was quiet and well-behaved, and that if he did behave well, he got a treat, even if it wasn’t possible for him to go have a sniff, which was what he really wanted.

Which brings me to the second part of my rant.

I would have liked to catch up with the owner of that little dog and ask her why she was taking him out for a walk when she clearly wasn’t paying him any attention or allowing him to indulge in any kind of normal dog behaviour - like sniffing good smells and peeing on things. In fact, I wanted to ask her why she had a dog at all!

When we first set out this morning, The Princess found a trail of something in the grass which had her spellbound. She spent so long with her nose glued to the ground that I thought we were never going to make any progress at all. It took us a good five minutes to travel about fifty yards. But you know what? Dogs, even sighthounds, are very much aroma-oriented animals. Smells are their landscape. They don’t care for a nice view from a hilltop, but they get a huge amount of information and pleasure from sniffing things along the way.

What The Princess found this morning was clearly the Johnny Depp of smells, and it was her walk.

So, who was I to deny her the pleasure of a good long sniff?

I was abruptly taken back to my childhood while reading Not Afraid To Use It this morning, because a question which blighted her childhood also echoed through mine. It was a metaphorical question, and you can bet your life that if we’d answered that one, we’d have been in very deep shit indeed.

Looking back, it seems to me that our parents came out with certain stock phrases without too much thought about what effect they might have. Maybe it was simply that their parents said them, or maybe they used them because they had the desired effect of making the kid shut up. Whatever the reason, many children of my generation heard the same things, over and over again.

So let’s examine a few of those phrases, and see if they’re as bad as I remember them. We’ll start with the one mentioned by Not Afraid To Use It in her blog post. ‘Just who do you think you are?‘

What does this say to a child? It says ‘you are not good enough for that’. It says ‘you are far too confident in my love for you if you think you can say that to me and get away with it’. Uh … don’t we want our children to grow up feeling worthy and confident and trust that we love them no matter what? I thought we did …

I used to get ‘who do you think you are?‘ when I questioned my Mum’s dictates on what I should wear or how I should behave. Now, I was basing my rebellion on the fact that my brothers were treated differently, but I had failed to take into account the facts that a) they were older than me, and b) I was a girl. However, I still think it would have been better had she pointed these things out to me and explained why she was making me conform to different standards. For instance, ‘I know, love, it’s tough isn’t it, but life just ain’t fair’ might have been easier to take. As it was, I was so wounded that I did indeed shut up, and I was still following Mum’s rules three decades later, when they were well and truly redundant.*

Another one I heard with distressing regularity was ‘Those who ask don’t get‘ which was often followed by ‘.. and those who don’t ask, don’t want‘. What kind of a twisted, sadistic thing is this? So you’re fucked whatever you do? Oh, way to teach a child the concept of learned helplessness and make sure they don’t try anything!

‘Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about‘. Classic! If a child’s upset enough to cry real tears, what are the chances that they can recover their equilibrium by sheer force of will-power? Yep, pretty well non-existent. So in saying this, you’re ensuring that the child becomes instantly more upset and you can get even more righteously angry at them. Sheesh. Great parenting lesson.

Well. at least my parents never - ever - said anything like ‘Don’t you fucking swear at me, you little bitch‘, a phrase I actually heard aimed at a toddler in a local shopping centre at ten o’clock one night by a very young mother.

Most kids had more responsible parents than that, of course, and most took the admonishments in their stride, but for those who took things to heart and who tended to think too deeply, they caused lasting damage, and clearly I was a sensitive soul because I grew up insecure, seriously lacking in confidence, and with an absolutely terrible self-image.

As you know, I’m not a fan of political correctness, but this isn’t a matter of PC gone mad. It’s psychologically damaging when conundra like this are aimed at children too young to understand, especially when they’re said in anger. Now, my parents loved me, that’s without question, and I’m pretty sure they were doing their level best to bring me up properly. They must have said these things without the faintest notion of how much they hurt. So if those words could screw us up so badly without our parents ever being aware of it, doesn’t that beg a very obvious question?

Yeah, that’s right. This one -

What damage have we done to our own kids without realising it?

* Yes, in my late forties. Then I discovered Johnny Depp and his ‘fuck it’ attitude to life.