The skip is full. We have our money’s worth in rubbish removed. I have not so much tidied the house as I have thrown out rubbish and that alone contributes to a sense of order and neatness. Usually I agonise about where to put things, this time given the amount of culling we have done, we now have the odd empty cupboard and more space in which to put the things we have decided to keep. I could be more ruthless still. It is a bit like Jill B described at a recent conferences. We fill our cellars up and the more we buy the more items that are less likely to be used get shoved towards the back until they all but disappear into the darkness. These are the foodstuffs that shift beyond their use by dates without us even noticing until a big clean out years later when we discover we have jars of fig and ginger jam going back to the mid eighties or bottles of some arcane brand of Japanese soy that we needed for a special recipe and used only, once dating back to 1990.
I still have the top tier of our wedding cake and that dates back to 1977 but I keep it on purpose. Tradition dictates that the left over wedding cake should be sealed and kept until either the christening of the first child, christening or birth, or perhaps it should be opened on the first wedding anniversary. In any case, we did neither and now I cannot bear to open it. I cannot imagine what it would look like, some sort of mummified cake. Were we to open it, heaven knows, it might be like opening up Pandora’s box. It might cause untold damage to our marital bliss, if bliss you can call it. We have been married for 31 years. I do not want to interfere with this.