Claire Burlington

The silence is over, but I’ve moved location and changed moniker (again). I’ve happily reverted to my very common given name of Claire Taylor so you can now find me here.

I’ve toyed with the idea of deleting some of the posts on this site as, in retrospect, several of them were written during periods of considerable emotional strain when my perspective was perhaps a little, er, warped, so they’re a bit, um, crackers and (I hope, uncharacteristically) sharp-edged. But having toyed with the idea, I put it back in the box. Those posts are what came out of the keyboard at the time, innit.

I hope all’s well with you and maybe see you soon!

All the best,

CT

I’m going retro and having a break from the internet, so I’m not going to be posting here for a while.

Soonly!

Claire B-T xxx

I’m delighted to be contributing a little to someone else’s work this week.

The ever-succulent Chris Goode is currently doing a show about doubting his atheism. It’s called GOD/HEAD and it’s a true story about God, neuroscience and, well, all manner of other things. This is the official blurb:

So there’s this writer.

Thirtysomething, gay, lefty metropolitan writer. Atheist, obviously. History of mental health problems, but those are all in the past.
Sure of himself and his world view. Comfortable in his assumptions.

And then one day, suddenly, without any warning…

There’s God.

In this brand new documentary piece, award-winning writer and storyteller Chris Goode explores the flipside of the familiar crisis of faith: what if there really is a God after all?

GOD/HEAD is a humane, candid, radically unsettling piece about the tensions between religion and neuroscience, and about the limits of language and the edges of desire.

Each night a different guest performer participates in the piece. I’m very excited to be the guest on March 1, so if any of you can make then, it would be lovely to see you afterwards! And, if not, there are plenty of other nights to choose from!

The piece is on at Ovalhouse at 7.45 Tuesday to Saturday from until March 10. You can book tickets via the Ovalhouse website.

Maybe see you there.

I’ve just read ‘Fahrenheit 451′.

I don’t really know why I hadn’t read it before now. It was Ray Bradbury’s ‘A Sound of Thunder’ (that one with the butterfly) … in ‘The Golden Apples of the Sun’ short story collection my English teacher Mrs Martin shoved in my direction in the first year at secondary school that got me going on science fiction. That and ‘Doctor Who’, when it was square.

But now I have finally read ‘Fahrenheit 451′. Jeepers. I spent the first few pages just gaping in utter disbelief. It’s astounding. It was written six decades ago and it’s got today taped. It’s all there; wall-to-wall TV, the disappearance of ‘real’ interaction’, people with constant stimulation of some sort delivered via things stuffed in their earholes, reality TV, interactive entertainment, a loss of respect for human life, constant ‘fun’ seeking, constant advertising, the reverence of the superficial and the inane, the suspicion of anything ‘serious’. All in a small book. That was part of the pleasure – short books often contain whole worlds of wonder. Length isn’t everything; it’s depth that matters. As the bishop said to… well, anyone who would listen.

And then I read the afterword in which Ray Bradbury mentions that, – and apologies if this is one of those commonly known facts that I’ve managed to miss – in 1954, Fahrenheit 451 was serialised in the 4th, 5th and 6th issues of a new magazine called  ‘Playboy’.

I’ll just say that again.

Fahrenheit 451 was serialised in ‘Playboy’.

I had no idea that Playboy even had a literature section, let alone that it took risks and published daring, anti-authority, government-challenging works! Why does no-one ever talk about this? Or maybe they do, but not in front of the ladies.  I’ve just investigated further and other Playboy alumni include Margaret Atwood, P G Wodehouse, Arthur C Clarke and Vladimir Nabokov. My extensive Wikipedia research doesn’t indicate which contemporary literary greats grace the pages of its more recent issues, but I do hope that the current Playboy team still recognise that entertainment for men can include the occasional caustic, crafted, gripping, terrifying, prophetic work of literature destined to become a classic, as well as nice knockers.

I’ve had a lot of people (quick, finish the sentence, Claire) asking about what’s on at The Woolwich Grand Theatre. I’m afraid I’m not the person to ask. That’s Adrian Green at info@thewoolwichgrandtheatre.com. There’s also a facebook page if you’re still down with the kids.

The Woolwich Grand has been the source of great joy and pain for me over the past year. Sadly, lately it’s been more of the pain, to the extent that I’m no longer really affiliated with the project. I mean, you may well see me up a ladder painting, or cleaning chewing gum off the floor, but I’m no longer any more involved than any other volunteer who’s giving up some time to help a local cause.

The reasons aren’t particularly complicated or interesting and are of the ‘artistic differences’ ilk. To me it was always simple: ‘We’re making a theatre; let’s put theatre in it!’, but I’ve gradually come to understand that that isn’t how the project is viewed by everyone. And I shall stop there. If you desperately want to know any more, then I’m happy to talk about it to you privately. To my mind, the separation has been amicable, so I hope Adrian feels that way too.

Also, I am currently, for various reasons, attempting to avoid stress, rather than actively seeking it out like a crazed cortisol junkie. Interestingly, the days when I would find myself alone in a state of fight-or-flight with not a lot to fight with or flee from are gone. Now, I just have those heart-pounding, wild-haired Palaeolithic moments in company. Great. Really great. Not all compay, you understand, but some. So, in the deeply selfish interest of self-preservation, I’m trying to keep contact with those, um, companies to a minimum.

But it’s been great fun! Those early days of battling the pigeons, the damp, the cold to make the building fit for human occupation were an absolute blast. If you don’t know me well, that might sound ironic. If you know me well, you’ll know it most definitely isn’t. Here’s hoping the project is a great success!

Many people who visit my blog aren’t searching for me.  They’re searching for all manner of other things, and somehow end up here to be, in most cases, terribly disappointed, I imagine.

In 2011, I had a lot of people hunting for information on ‘Diogenes syndrome’ and ‘extreme hoarding’. Then there were folk searching  for cute and cuddly things such as a ‘baby field mouse’ and a ‘curled up mouse’, though life wasn’t all roses in 2011 for these mouse-lovers, as evidenced by the  tragic ‘baby mouse squashed’.

There were also the random requests: ‘mending old anglepoise lamp oxford’, ‘two level terrarrium’, ‘theathre face for child’.

And an abundance of people desperately seeking entertainment in southeast London: ‘independent escort woolwich’, ‘prostitute south london’, and my favourite: ‘hore house woolwich’.

So. 2011.

In summary:

The best of times:
- Feeding mice with a paintbrush at 4 in the morning.
- Spending hours scraping all the chewing gum off the carpet at The Woolwich Grand Theatre only to be presented with a steam cleaner that had been there all along for the last section, which took moments.
- The glorious day trip to Cambridge to vote for the new Chancellor (Brian Blessed woz robbed): lunch in the Maypole, an impromptu tour of the new (to me) ADC, a spot of dressing up in gowns, tea and cake and memory lane.

The worst of times:
- Well, clearing houses of heaps of stuff.
- And repeatedly trying to guess what the church might actually permit on my father’s gravestone. (Still haven’t managed a good guess).
- And being in the middle of a riot zone.
- (And some other stuff that I talk about in an anonymous blog which I might link to one day)

So, pretty much on the pants side of poo.

Roll on 2012!

Theatre-wise, I’ve been mostly ambivalent about things I’ve seen this year. I loved The Adventures of Wound-Man and Shirley, which is touring in 2012, I believe, so take a gander at that. And a Cinderella at the Battersea Mess and Music Hall was absolutely delightful, but big shows pretty much left me cold this year as so many lacked heart and humanity.

For example, two shows which have been raved about left me feeling empty. The Animals and Children Took to the Streets was beautiful to look at, technically superb, but just lacked heart. I felt no emotional connection to any of the characters – well, OK, maybe the caretaker a little bit – but the rest of the world thought it was amazing. And it was. Technically. But surely there’s only so long you can marvel at a person’s ability to pat the head of an animated dog? Actually, there might not have been an animated dog, I can’t remember, but ultimately, this play would have been the same if it was a cartoon. There’s no doubt that all the members of this company are hugely accomplished, but the fact that there were some real, live, breathing, thinking people in this piece didn’t seem to add to it. The piece had  to be precise and regimented because of the technical side of it, and that left no room for it to be fresh each time. No room for real connection. It has to be replicated each night rather than performed. If that makes any kind of sense.

I was also one of apparently only two people in the world who thought London Road (a verbatim musical about the residents of the road where the man who committed the Ipswich murders of 2006 lived) was bizarrely tedious and unexpectedly nasty (sorry, Adam – you’re brilliant, but even you admitted in the programme notes that it was, by its nature, boring) in stark opposition to the rest of the world who seemed to side with the critics and deem it the most wonderful musical ever. Like The Animals and Children… it was undoubtedly technically superb, but it was uncomfortable to watch, not as in ‘Heck, I feel uncomfortable because this is making me confront all sorts of uncomfortable issues’ but uncomfortable as in ‘Heck, I feel uncomfortable because I cannot fathom why they made this’. Some of the choices made by the creative team seemed bizarre. For example, the big musical comedy set-piece was all about a reporter trying, failing and eventually succeeding to not say the word ‘semen’. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s a rude word and everything. But his report is about the bodily fluid found inside women who were raped and murdered. Context does matter. Some might say it’s everything. But this didn’t stop half the bloody National Theatre audience roaring with laughter and clapping when he finally managed not to say semen. Yes, we all know funny, inappropriate things happen in the direst circumstances, but this song didn’t point that up; it was a comic number about a man getting frustrated with his inability to not say a certain word. The context had been forgotten. As people around me guffawed, I was sitting there muttering ‘This is disgusting’. Disgusting and boring! Wow! Bring on the awards!

Verbatim theatre seems to have gone mainstream now,  but a verbatim piece that is, well, verbatim, will surely always need work (beyond editing and, in this case, composing music and setting conversations and [endlessly] repeated phrases to it) to become a play, otherwise, why not just make a documentary? You can make compelling documentary theatre – ask Richard Norton-Taylor. I found it incredibly telling that the one time when London Road really came alive with humanity was when recordings of interviews with local women working as prostitutes were played. This was directly after, if my memory serves me correctly, the actors had delivered the same words, with the same vocal nuances, but with no connection to the words and therefore no soul. That brief burst of recorded speech highlighted how unreal the rest of the piece was. And demonstrated beautifully that replicating vocal patterns aint enough  – you still need to connect body, mind and soul to the words otherwise you end up with a bunch of people shuffling about looking and sounding like they’ve had lobotomies. Which is sadly, what I saw when I witnessed London Road.  And all the way through, I couldn’t help wondering about what Alecky Blythe, the verbatim theatre practitioner who co-created this piece might have been thinking when she started travelling up to Ipswich to record interviews while bodies were still being found. It reminded me of how, when I finished reading In Cold Blood, I felt that the title also applied to Mr Capote.

I will accept that 2011 has been pretty extreme in very real ways for me, so maybe I’m just over anything theatrical that’s gimmicky or, for some other reason, doesn’t reach my heart.

On a happier note, I discovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2011 (yes, that’s rather more than fashionably late to the party, I know) and its sheer brilliance, wit, intelligence, inventiveness, compassion and character development  pretty much knocked all the theatre I saw into a cocked hat. I have a suspicion that it might be quite tragic that I’ve never identified with a fictional character as much as with Spike (seasons 5-7). Or maybe everyone feels that way?

The Woolwich Grand Theatre is Go!

Having had the planning meeting scheduled for the end of September and then moved to October, it was suddenly brought forward to earlier this evening.

And, earlier this evening,  the arts centre application was passed unanimously by Greenwich Council.

Thank you, Councillors and Planning Officers!

Hurray! Phew! Gosh! Eek! Now the fun really starts.

And something else I wanted to say…

You know how it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind?

Well, I want to change my mind about the council. At least a bit. Recently, I had been feeling  that big business was their major interest, and the people on the Woolwich omnibus were not too high on the agenda, but I was so impressed by their efficiency, pragmatism and good-spiritedness at the planning meeting tonight. There were several applications under consideration and each was dealt with quickly and directly. All questions raised were completely appropriate and, if answered satisfactorily, then the applications were passed with no further ado. I don’t know why, but I expected it to be a much more adversarial process with all sorts of shillyshallying and bluster. There wasn’t any of that. At all. And the councillors even looked quite pleased when we all gave their decision a large round of applause.

Three cheers! Hip hip! Hurrah! Huzzah!

So, a quick update on the Greenwich Ministry of Truth’s progress in shoving recent events in Woolwich down memory holes.

I was at The Woolwich Grand (frustratingly, we’re still not quite able to open as the planning hearing date which was scheduled for later on this month has now been pushed back to October…) yesterday and had a conversation with Mike, the independent filmmaker who had filmed the riots from his balcony. He’d ended up on Australian TV talking about the riots, while broadcasters closer to home displayed far less interest.

Mike and his colleagues at Jellyfielders had been there at the inception of the Woolwich Wall, the outlet for local feeling on the boarded-up, burnt-out Great Harry pub. People of all ages and backgrounds wrote on this wall, expressing feelings from rage to sorrow to hope. And no-one stole the pens that were put there for common use. And Danny Mercer gave a brilliant interview beside it. But, hey, guess what, while Peckham proudly preserves its Post-Its, the Woolwich Wall is whitewashed. Well, wiped out by battleship grey.

You’d think that after a display of societal breakdown, community feeling would be encouraged and celebrated by the powers that be. Out here it seems that Greenwich Council just want to pretend none of it happened – even the good bits. They even pulled out of attending a public meeting about how to move on after the riots, and just held a private one for local businesses.

Hey ho.

Anyway, even if the council is determined to turn a blind eye to efforts of locals to rally round and build something good, the residents of southeast London are, frankly, so used to being ignored that they’ll just get on and do what they’re going to do anyway.

Provided they get the necessary planning permission…

Fingers tightly crossed for The Grand.

Snappy title, huh? But I do. I really do.

I’m a Chris Goode fanboy. I love him. I love his work (not unconditionally, and I haven’t seen it all, but I do love it) and no other theatre-maker has ever made me produce such a variety and quantity of bodily fluids in public. I do tend to leak emotions in liquid form quite readily, but grace à lui, I’ve almost drowned by inhaling my own giggle-snot, almost choked to death on my own chortle-phlegm and almost suffocated from trying to turn back a tide of molten sadness.Yesterday, I ended up with a soggy cowl neck jumper as it was the only handy absorbent material substantial enough to mop up the range of water-based feelings my facial orifices were emitting.

If you can, do see The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley at the Pleasance Baby Grand and, even if you’re less leaky than I am, I’m sure you’ll leave feeling different to how you went in. I’m simultaneously laughing with delight and holding back tears just thinking about it. It’s on tomorrow and Monday, so hurry!

And then we could talk about it.

Well, gosh, oh dear, oh dearie dear, what a couple of days.

I went up to Edinburgh to see, amongst other things, Lighthouse Theatre’s production of my play ‘Nourish’.

I didn’t see my play. I saw an adaptation of it. Which would have been fine if I’d been expecting an adaptation, but I wasn’t.

I was aware that the company had moved a speech and needed to trim for time. Knowing that the play runs at about an hour and that the company had an hour’s slot, I was anticipating nips from lines and, as no-one had run any cuts past me (I had already vetoed the moving of another speech and a suggested cut), I assumed there must be very few of these, but I was wrong. The play I saw was not the play I wrote.

To be honest, I feel quite sad about the whole experience. I know the company were shocked that I was unhappy with the alterations they had made and I feel absolutely rotten for casting a shadow over their time in Edinburgh. I don’t know the company well, but they all seem to be genuinely lovely people with extremely good intentions and actions to match (for example, donating profits from the show to Women for Women International). I also believe the company were happy with their work but, all the same, that is not justification for altering a proven piece so greatly and not mentioning it to the writer.

After seeing the piece, I asked the company to make it very clear to audiences that this piece is not my play, but is their adaptation based on my play. The company decided to cancel the rest of the run.

The changing of scripts is a contentious issue and it’s the playwright who runs the risk of seeming prima donna-ish if they object to changes made in rehearsal rooms. The fact that I’m writing this blog post at all probably seems prima donna-ish, but, if you read to the end, hopefully I’ll have been able to shed a little light on the writer’s perspective.

Firstly, when you’ve written a play, you’ve wrestled with the slippery beast of the English language so as to make the story that you want to tell; it’s not hugely unreasonable to want that story to remain in the shape you battled to create. Also, when rehearsing a script-based play, the job of director and actors is to serve the text. The play has been written. That part is over. Now it is being made into a production, a process which is a whole nother kettle of fish. One of the incredible things about working from a script is that there is an endless number of different ways to do the work, and that infinite array of possibilities comes from the directing and acting choices, not from rewrites. Many actors and directors like to change the script and make it their own, but this is not ‘doing a production of a play’, it is ‘adapting a play’ or ‘using a play as inspiration’ which, again, is a whole nother kettle of fish.

With regard to the show in Edinburgh, I had agreed to a production of a play, not an adaptation of a play. The company had invited me to rehearsals but, as I was not aware they were adapting the script, I saw no need to go and see what directorial or acting choices they were making – after all, it was their production.

The piece I saw earlier this week ran at only 40 minutes. It was a short piece to start with, and I was stunned by how much was missing. I don’t have the script committed to memory word-for-word right now, but the major things I noticed were as follows:

The Wardress’s routine tasks (delivering and removing Sylvia’s food tray and preparing the milk-and-egg mixture for force-feeding) had been removed, thus removing the fundamental structure of the piece, the sense of time passing and the repeated contact between Sylvia and the Wardress.

The story of how Sylvia had ended up in prison had been removed, thus removing a heck of a lot of the fiery, funny, self-mocking, non-starved Sylvia who then deteriorates as she becomes weaker.

Discussion of Sylvia’s work, political and social aims, her art, her letter-writing, her mother, her father and Keir Hardie had been cut, along with much of her political fervour, manic working and developing confusion.

Sylvia’s etching of drawings into the cell walls had been removed.

The Wardress’s discovery of Sylvia’s work and her choice to let it stay hidden had been removed.

The final speeches from both characters had been removed.

The Wardress’s focussed displacement during the forcefeeding scene had been cut.

The doctor’s guilt over the forcefeeding had been cut.

I won’t examine all the changes that were made to what remained, but things were different from the off. The speech which I knew had been moved to the start of the play was truncated and had at least one line in it (a quotation) that I did not put in the original play.

If you’re not a writer, actor or director, these changes may not sound much to fret over, but the tiniest tweak can dramatically alter meaning, character and relationships, change the information that is being conveyed, make ensuing events seem disjointed, and even knock the whole play out of whack. For example, in the original script, Sylvia had a line which describes how a doctor reprimands her for vomiting milk and blood over his hands after forcible feeding:

‘he tuts and says, quite gently, ‘Naughty girl’

In this Edinburgh version, this line had been removed and replaced by the Wardress bellowing ‘Naughty girl!’ directly at Sylvia. Might not seem like much, but that one change introduces an aspect of the Wardress’s character not seen anywhere else in the script, throws a totally different light on the relationship between Sylvia and the Wardress, throws the hierarchy of doctors and wardresses off kilter, denies us knowledge of the doctor’s attitude to Sylvia, and denies us a pointer towards the fact that the forcefeeding process was becoming normalised by those who had to administer it. In short, the function and effect of the altered line bears no similarity to the function and effect of the original.

I had been sitting watching the piece in a state of dazed disbelief, but when I heard that bellowed ‘Naughty girl!’, I’m afraid I had a strong desire to leave the building.

I’m not wishing to make a negative qualitative assessment of the production – bold acting and directing choices were made and, as I hope I’ve made clear, those choices are entirely up to the company. That’s the point. That’s putting on a play. That’s the business of show. I do not have any issue with that. In fact, I love it! I do, however, have a problem with my name being attached to something where my contribution was so greatly altered without consultation.

Anyway. It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry and we’ve agreed to tie this episode up in a neat bow and leave it there. I wish the company all the best with their future work.

A few weeks ago, before the mass rioting took grip of the country, before our Government decided to respond by donning jackboots and stamping rather than even attempting to understand why this eruption had happened, and before I went on an intensive driving course and had to leave early due to being generally impossible (*blushes*), I had a wee trip out to the sticks to do a spot of sorting and clearing.

I’ve spent a significant portion of the past year sorting and clearing and splashing industrial strength cleaning products about. There have been times when, standing atop a seemingly unclearable heap,  I thought it was never going to end. But progress has been made. We really are almost there. Or at least ‘there’ enough to be able to start picking up certain threads of my life’s rich tapestry from where I put them down a year ago. Phew.

There have been two houses to sort and clear and the snapshots below are of the second.

Compulsive hoarding and its still more insanitary sibling Diogenes syndrome are almost impossible to adequately describe to people who haven’t witnessed them first hand (I had a go at describing here, talking about the first house). I can see why it’s hard to understand just how horrific it is if you’ve not been in amongst the piles; a heap of stuff is just a heap of stuff, surely? The stuff itself is overwhelming, but the stuff is so much more than material objects – it’s memories and people and happy times and sad times and hopes and ambitions and love and anger and fears and regrets and intentions and failings all densely packed and congealed with remnants of rotten food, mysterious gungy matter and rat droppings. And even if the heaps are gunge- and dropping-free, they’re still great big immoveable objects that restrict access to sinks, toilets, bathrooms, cookers, chairs, beds, windows, doors, floors and living. How can you have visitors if all the chairs are buried? How can you get someone to mend the leaky sink if the kitchen floor is four-foot deep in stuff? How can you turn on the central heating if the boiler or thermostat is behind a two-metre high heap?

Fundamentally, if you’ve got really bad piles, then they dominate your life.

The farmhouse I was clearing up had been overrun by rats when my father was living there. My aunt had cleared out all the bags of rotting food (the top layer of ‘matter’, exactly the same as in the other house) a few years ago when it was no longer possible for my dad to live there. After that, the rats moved out and the burglars moved in, but they didn’t make much of an impression…

The first house took a long time to do. I’d started clearing up when my father was living there but then the clearing continued for a different reason, so it was hard to get rid of things at once. There are right times to say goodbye to things. Recently acquired objects were easy to throw away or take to the charity shop, but I needed a respectable pause before tackling the things that had been in the house for 30 years. (I don’t think this is a hoarding characteristic; I think it’s completely normal when dealing with the belongings of a family member who has died). However, almost a year on, I’d become pretty ruthless. For me. So I hired a big skip.

Big skip

I also took my camera with me as, over the past year, I’ve  found that one way of making mucking out a house easier is to take photographs of items that you would have liked to hold on to (for a little while, at least) had gunge, droppings, time and space not dictated otherwise. I now have several hundred digital photographs of things. But they take up no physical room.

And so the clearing began.

Well, once we’d hacked down a Sleeping Beauty’s forest of nettles in order to get to the door and then sledgehammered and jemmied and angle-ground the boarded-up and astoundingly strong remnants of the burglarised door in order to get in, the clearing began.

Front door

Kitchen

Kitchen

Sitting room

Scullery

Front bedroom

Landing

Master bedroom

The job required gloves, masks and a gung-ho attitude.

What was in the heaps?

Off the top of my head: endless newspapers and magazines, books on every subject under the sun, stacks of videos, shelves of videos, telescopes, microscopes, chemical balances,  the cassette recorder from my childhood, the car blanket, the tent, drawings by a five-year-old me, mirrors, more mirrors, more and more and more mirrors, 1950s radio sets, wind-up gramophones, portable gramophones, weighing scales, paraffin lamps, hi-fis, typewriters, broken printers, ancient computer monitors, sewing machines, a broadsword, an epee, two pianos, one harmonium, one electronic keyboard, a piano accordion, a broken guitar, hundreds of framed pictures from charity shops, the odd airgun and shotgun or so, Fordson Major tractor manuals, the traditional car engine in the kitchen, shotgun cartridges in boxes, Ferguson tractor manuals, shotgun cartridges loose in unexpected places, air rifle pellets, Dyson vacuum cleaners, a Nazi armband, a gas mask, new telephones, vintage telephones, Pocahontas-shaped bottles of bubble bath, a whip, a remoska, boxes of pans, sheet music, cameras, miniature steam engines, warming pans, theodolytes, light bulbs, copies of the Magna Carta, a Millennium dome keyring, Christmas cards, framed photographs, model aircraft engines, model aircraft, model aircraft plans, model aircraft magazines, wine-making flagons, chunks of lead, a small bottle of mercury, thousands of semiconductors and diodes, drills, socket sets, drill bit sets, electric screwdrivers, electronic callipers, slide rules, thousands of old photographs, barometers, a three-in-one pocket voltameter, miniature brass cannons, yo-yos…

etcetera

etcetera

etcetera.

And a lot of that went into the ‘keep’ heap.

As for the rest, before the skip arrived, we created piles outside:

Starting to move 'rubbish' out

More for the skip

And more...

And some more

As we worked down through the layers, we exposed things long forgotten:

The kitchen table! (And cutlery drawer)

Chair!

Cupboard and drawers!

Fireplace!

More floor!

Still more floor!

Not too sure what's in there...

Sofa

Granddad

Irony?

We left the bathroom for another time.

Bathroom

Once the skip was full, my cousin made cunning use of a couple of big round bales and compacted the contents, giving us space for another third of a load.

Squashing it in

Scrap metal went in a separate heap for a separate skip, but we didn’t even attempt to move the collection of broken washing machines in the undergrowth.

And, eventually, this is where we got to:

Kitchen

Kitchen

Sitting Room

Scullery

Landing

Front Bedroom

Back bedroom

Master Bedroom

And the sun shone through the rain!

There was a very good BBC documentary broadcast recently about hoarding and Jasmine  Harman, who tried to help her mum clear the decks in the programme,  has set up this excellent site for helping people with hoarding problems. The documentary was so good because it showed how ‘stuff’ can privately dominate a publically ‘normal’ family and how horribly painful it is for the hoarder and family to get to grips with the problem. Hoarders are undoubtedly impossible to live with and can be aggressive and hurtful if you pass comment or offer assistance, but they’re in a terrible muddle and, though the powers that be are still shillyshallying about classifying hoarding as a psychological condition, it seems logical that  there are reasons and triggers for this sort of behaviour, such as some sort of loss, be it emotional or physical. I think that it’s a very sad condition, as the objects sometimes seem to become substitutes for other things; emotions, interaction, people.

I remember a conversation about a decade ago, at the farm, while trying to help my father do a bit of tidying up. I went out on a limb and suggested that maybe we could throw some things away. This suggestion wasn’t received too well, so I searched around for a suitable, harmless object to use as a guinea pig. My eye alighted on a battered and broken peach-coloured lampshade.

‘What about this? We could throw this away.’

‘But it was my mother’s’

‘Yes, but it’s broken. You can’t use it any more. We can throw it away.’

‘But wouldn’t she be upset with me for throwing it away?’

‘Well, she’d be more upset to see the state of the house!’

And he looked so forlorn that I gave up and we just shuffled a few objects from pile to pile.

The lampshade has now been thrown away.