After 5 months of tidying our local streets assisted by the Litterati app, we decided it was time to call in some extra help! On Saturday we were joined by 10 locals for an hour of litter-picking along our road. We really enjoyed this chance to meet new neighbours and reconnect with old ones.

As we collected rubbish from the gutters, pavements and front gardens, we chatted with people who wondered what we were up to, and hopefully encouraged them to think more about how they might look after their neighbourhood. The hour was up in no time, and we reconvened for a well earned cuppa and mince pie.

Collectively we had gathered eight bagfuls of rubbish and our road was looking positively radiant in the winter sun. Though we’d been picking up other people’s rubbish, we found it a very positive experience; the morning was all about owning the problem and being part of the solution. We’re already looking forward to a big spring clean in 2018!

Many thanks to Neeta from Cleanup UK for all her support and for making this whole process so easy. Why should we pick other people’s litter? Take a look at this short film:

Fancy organising your own clean up, or joining an existing litter group? Check out litteraction.org.uk

We’d love to hear about your litter picking events. Leave us a comment or a tweet @stuffoholics and we’ll give you a shout out.

Together, we can make a difference.

Today the cold has reached my core and my hands do not wish to fly across the keys.  Please be patient if I seem a little slow-witted too.

As stuffoholics we like to think of our possessions as vintage and loved, rather than old and worn out in need of replacement (yes this does feel like it is getting personal!) Last week I watched the glass butter dish lid slip from my hand and hit the floor. I did not think as it fell in slow motion –  great I’ve been wanting a new one for ages. No, as I saw it break into pieces, my first thought was – can you superglue a butter dish lid? The butter dish, a reminder of a bustling house and a time when it needed to be filled many times a week.  At this point I realised that perhaps like the rest of my life the butter dish needs downsizing or to make me feel better ‘rightsizing’. I reluctantly googled ‘glass butter dish’ to find a replacement but knew I really didn’t want to buy more stuff given the battle to get 5 a day out the door.  Luckily I thought instead- there must in that kitchen drawer which contains things that will be useful someday be something to put butter in.

Hmm… as you can see glass jars and ramekins are my Achilles heel. Today though, to my surprise, the ramekin stash was part of the solution not the problem. A ramekin combined with  a small glass bowl- the perfect butter dish for my current life. One ramekin finally repurposed to again see the light of day.

All’s well that ends well as they say, but suggestions for what to do with the bottom half of a ‘vintage’ glass butter dish very welcome. It would be nice if it didn’t languish in the someday drawer too long!

p.s. The clutter gods are playing with me. My son has been clearing out and he just said “Here you are, I know you like to keep them, here’s a ramekin.”  No…………

I’m not a technologically savvy individual; I’ve never used WhatsApp, I’m generally un-selfied and I mostly use my mobile for making phone calls. However, five months ago I watched a Ted Talk that convinced me to download a free app called Litterati which subsequently changed my whole attitude towards my environment.

If this has you intrigued, take a look for yourself. It’s only six minutes long, and it’ll be time well spent.

You didn’t watch the film? Keep reading, maybe I can still convince you…

In my pre-Litterati days, I would complain on an increasingly regular basis about the state of my neighbourhood. The fly tipping and litter appalled me. I had no idea how litterers could be converted into non-litterers, so it looked like a problem that would never go away… which sadly made it everyone’s problem.

Downloading the Litterati app helped me make a conscious decision to be a part of the solution. Over the course of five months, I’ve been picking up street litter and recycling the plastic, glass bottles and cans.

This map shows all the rubbish I’ve removed from my neighbourhood since the summer. Litter is still a problem, but now I’m helping to solve that problem (which feels a whole lot better than my previous complaining.)

I started using the app back in June and here we are five months- and five hundred pieces of litter- later. My attitude towards litter has changed. I still hate it, but I hate it enough to do something about it.

Next up, I’ll be asking my neighbours to join me picking litter… an afternoon of making our street a better place and hopefully feeling that little bit better as a result.

Here’s the 500th piece of litter I picked up; a coffee cup from McDonald’s (actually, we’re NOT Lovin It.)

So, if you hate litter as much as I do… please don’t walk past the next piece you see.  Pick it up and bin it (or recycle it, if at all possible.) It’ll feel really good.

And to see what a big difference you can make, download the Litterati app & join a worldwide community of litter pickers. Every piece counts!

Last week was Samhain marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. You would therefore not have been surprised to find a food waste post on gleaning and thought title was meant to be ‘Picking Pumpkins’ but somehow autocorrect had stepped in.  But as it happens today after the soul searching of previous weeks and sense that progress was not as rapid as imagined decided to remember the benefits in any change programme of ‘quick wins‘ or  less commonly ‘low hanging fruit’. To my surprise amongst the free google images was low hanging pomegranates, so picking pomegranates which conjured up summer days not gloomy winter it was.

So what are the ‘quick wins’ ? An excellent question which deserves an answer of the same calibre but I don’t have one prepared. After all these months the only way to achieve a ‘quick win’ would be to change my mindset, my emotional attachment to stuff and hate of waste. That is no ‘quick win’. That I suspect will be my life journey.

Hate to disappoint but all I can do for today is at least tackle food waste and offer you a recipe for pumpkin soup.

….and for your understanding wish you good luck in life in finding fruit laden pomegranate trees that you can reach.

Let it go, let it GO!!!! For copyright reasons I can’t feature a picture of a certain white haired heroine at this point, but I can guarantee she is currently belting out a certain catchy anthem inside your head. So sorry.

Today I am pondering why, the best part of a year after starting this blog,  my house is still filled to the brim with all the clutter I resolved to clear away. Why can’t I just Let It Go? Let me see…

1. Toys. My children are in their twenties now. They’ve moved on from Sylvanian Families, cuddly animals and the endless pieces of plastic nonsense they once coveted every birthday… but I haven’t. OK, I don’t feel any particular attachment to the Matchbox cars or DS games, but how can I say goodbye to the toys we gave names? The ones who shared our triumphs and disasters? They are like members of my family. I’m coming to terms with my daughter leaving home, but can’t let go of the cuddlies whose lumpy shapes betray their loyalty to the little girl who once loved them so very much.
2. Art. Well, my children’s art. I’m starting to see a pattern here. The smudgy hand prints, the huge-headed portraits of family members, the once-upon-a-time stories in such careful handwriting… the evolution of their world view, laid out on paper. In the attic, there are still some of my own drawings; aged seven, when bunny rabbits still wore fancy hats and had afternoon tea with endless cream buns. Are these my children’s inheritance?
3. Photos. In those pre-digital camera days, I amassed hundreds (nay thousands?) of photos of (you guessed it) my growing family. Ten albums full, then shoe boxes of loose pics waiting to be albumed-up. I know I should cull these, or scan them, or reduce them to a carefully selected album for each of my offspring. But it’s such a gargantuan task.
4. Calendars & diaries going back years, which I’ll be needing when I label all those loose photos. Was that holiday in Folkestone or Felixstowe? Just dig out the appointment diary from 1994 to find out!
5. Words. I used to write lots. It kept me sane, scribbling oddments in exercise books. Journals, daily pages, stream of consciousness, ideas for books, short stories… it’s all stashed in a big metal box & I never want it read by anyone else. I’m not sure I want to read any of it either, as it’ll only stir up sleeping demons. But I can’t just shred it. I need to look at it all one last time before I Let It Go. I’m just waiting for the right moment <looks down at shoes>

   I could go on, but I think you’ve got the picture. So much stuff to clear out, but every day I’m finding excuses. The truth is, I’m too attached to these things to see them clearly. I’ve given each of these fluffy toys, scraps of paper & unlabelled photos an emotional value. Which makes it an even greater wrench to clear this stuff from my house. Maybe recognising the problem is the first step.

   And every long journey starts with a single step…

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

H. L. Mencken

Today the title might have meant you expected a picture of a cupboard or wardrobe. From the outside no issue but once drawer or door opened it clear that we are drowning in stuff. Amazed at how much can be crammed into such a tiny space but in so doing making it impossible to access anything, each time door opened. Once opened door quickly shut again till have time to deal with all that stuff. Mixture of usual suspects that plague our cluttered lives –  things that need to be kept, let go, repaired, rehomed, recycled, remembered, forgotten…….

But all of that is for another day. No, today we return to that desk of mine.  The slightly out of focus picture a deliberate photographic device to symbolise loss of decluttering way. The desk suffering from the opposite of ‘out of sight,out of mind’ syndrome.  Not the spot the difference desk game but more jenga should I need to retrieve something from it.  Why? The fear that a task will be forgotten if put away, so left in open view so it will get done. Now if the task is to take something somewhere on the morrow then putting it by the door is an excellent device. But here’s the rub if it is to take it somewhere at time unspecified then it will fail.  After  48hrs an item placed somewhere to remind you to deal with it becomes invisible at best and at worst something else is put on top of it and it becomes a new permanent table!

So what do I propose doing to tackle the pile that is perilously perched on desk and I need to be reminded to do.

A box and a list

• Each task that is not going to be done TODAY (I don’t mean early tomorrow I mean today !!) will be put on list and a time set by when it must be done. Associated paper and stuff  will be put in box. 
• Each morning, before open lid to waken sleeping laptop, must look at list and take from box stuff whose expiry date has been reached. If there is nothing about to create a crisis then I can tackle task(s) of choice.
• Almost forgot, at end of day , task(s) not done get put on list and in box. Experience suggests this step could prove trickier than step 1 as one always thinks it’s not worth doing because you’ll deal with them tomorrow!

As ever wish me luck and a Happy #cleardeskday  to you too!

ps Ok those of you who are sticklers for detail it’s not officially Clear your desk day today but why wait it could be.

This blog began back in May with the direct aim of helping us tackle the mountains of clutter which were threatening to engulf us. In the past seven months we’ve had some small successes, interspersed with the odd relapse. After decades of gathering this stuff around us, it was never going to be easy to get rid of it all.

Well, on Sunday a whole heap of stuff left my house; boxes of kitchenware, bags of clothes, books, bedding, electrical equipment, a guitar… all headed out the front door for good. There’s a huge empty space this clutter once occupied. It’s strange to see, like the gap left by a pulled tooth.

I stand on my newly claimed floor space with confused emotions. Yes, it’s great to see floorboards again, but I’m not really celebrating. The clutter has gone, but so has my daughter… off to make her way in the big wide world.  It’s true I wanted the clutter gone, but not the clutterer.

Given time, I’m sure I’ll start feeling better about all this.

But right now, I really miss that clutter.

Last December, on one of those surreal days ‘twixt Christmas and the New Year, I found myself wide awake at 6:30am in a house full of gently snoring relatives. I felt as excited as an Enid Blyton character on a quest for adventure as I leapt from bed, into my clothes and out of the sleeping house.

Shrouded in freezing fog and sparkling with frost, the deserted streets were magical. A pale sun was just making its appearance as I alighted from the train and went in search of a particularly lovely river view.

I searched in vain. There was nothing to see but fog; a blank wall denying the existence of any river. It was eerie and enchanting, but also disconcerting. Peering into the whiteness, I could no longer imagine the familiar scenery.

Today I find myself equally befogged, staring hopelessly at a blank screen which refuses obstinately to reveal what I’m struggling to find. I have no questions to answer, no quirky theme to explore or axe to grind.

But life’s like that… some days the sun shines, others we’re lost in the fog

Earlier in this journey a stormy night had put me in frame of mind where it felt like moving deckchairs on Titanic to tackle my stuff. Time has passed and the clutter monster has been tackled and tamed in part but also grown in places where it has been left alone. The world can still be a daunting place, natural disasters and political posturing much to the fore of late. So returning to that post. What can I do? Well, the post reminded me that I can choose to do just one thing today. To give myself the satisfaction of completing a task no matter how small and not just berate myself for the stuff not yet done. What I mused should I choose to get star treatment. I decided to tackle this box.

I have been happily adding to this box with no plan as to what will happen when I can stuff no more in. I have tripped and fallen into the it may come in useful someday trap, a perennial risk for a stuffoholic. Each item added worthy and  innocent enough but the cumulative effect unless questioned would be anything that entered this house would stay well past the date when it should have left. For example, how many old newspapers does one really need? One might postulate it depends of course on how many you use and how frequently supply can be replenished. Undeniably so but with free newspapers readily available one could argue the answer thus must be only one or two given that is the most one would use in a week unless decorating or gardening or ….. As a  stuffoholic of course I will reason that at some point supply will dry up and demand will increase. Again, almost certainly true but will it be in your lifetime is the question to ask and even if that answer is yes. Will it really matter if you have to ask family and friends if they have any of the item tucked away just in case.

Oh.. to be a minimalist …  I am sure you can see that these questions apply to all the stuff.

Back to achievement for today. The emptyish box did not make me smile but the discovery of a guitar playing minion in it did! For now it’s replaced an empty (now recycled) yogurt pot on desk as my must tackle plastic waste reminder.

I can say I did at least one thing today.

May you get one thing done today too.