I have spent the last forty minutes filling two Ikea “Pappis” boxes with DVDs I had been keeping in a loft. I will always support owning your own copy of something, but with Blu-ray having now existed for twenty years, my having joined that bandwagon in 2011, looking at these discs has either made me think, “I’ve got this on Blu-ray now,” or, “I’ll come back to this eventually”. Then in the box it goes, to be taken away. VHS, DVD, or Blu-ray, most people will have had this discussion with themselves.
I had an enormous amount of trepidation at beginning to clear out this loft, which I had filled with (most of) a life’s worth of books, comics, CDs and DVDs, especially as it had reached “where do you even start?” levels. But I had been asked to start because the heatwaves that made the summer of 2026 so uncomfortable also highlighted how combustible people’s houses became in that heat, and so much paper in a room without climate control was now asking for trouble.
With limited space elsewhere at home for me to use as storage, I was confronted with the option that immediately confirmed I had too much stuff, leading me to reject it very quickly: paying for a self-storage facility. I could not see myself maintaining an off-site memory hole, being held in conditions even further out of my control.
I had needed to something about this at some point, which had always been “later”, but being asked causes you to reconsider your priorities. Once I had come to terms with having a collection that made me look like a budding hoarder, I could find a way of turning this experience into a positive one.
After tiring myself out on the first weekend by bringing out the items I clearly had no use of like exercise equipment, old PC peripherals and wires, and a typewriter, I established a routine of coming home from work, eating dinner, then clearing out two bags or boxes of items, mostly books. By the weekend, not only could you tell yourself you made a good start, but you also would have spent a week considering whether you ever going to get around to reading, watching or listening to that, and could that question have been asked at the time of acquiring the item?
I now look forward to having this moment of catharsis each evening, and I haven’t gone back to retrieve anything so far. These books, films, TV shows and so on do not become lost just because I don’t have access to them. Remembering that has made parting with them that much easier.
What this ongoing process has also done is highlight where I used to be hastier in getting rid of things, like having none of my school exercise books because I only deemed the end of term grade as important. Likewise, I had re-bought, some time ago, two books I thought had gone years before: “The Saga of Erik the Viking” by Terry Jones, with painted illustrations by Michael Foreman, and a 1975 book titled “The Science Fiction Book: An Illustrated History” by Franz Rottensteiner, which had been a case of searching online for a book that could match my memory of what was in the pages. I could have saved myself a lot of time.