So what have you been up to? I am sure you are not asking. It has been a busy few weeks, with the usual round up talks in person and online. I’ve just begun the journey with the latest cohort of students on my Pharos online course that helps to uncover the stories of agricultural labouring ancestors and this week also sees the start of the course on One-Place Studies. I’ve been putting the finishing touches to the next Braund Society magazine that I have been editing for an unbelievable thirty years. Add to this preparing an index for a forthcoming book, working on updates for a new edition for another and starting to produce a third and there’s not been much time for anything else. The job I must not mention is drawing to a close for another season and has brought its usual delights and frustrations. There is already a buzz about Rootstech 2024. I am pleased to have been accepted on to their media team once again. Having made the decision that I would take a year off from speaking at Rootstech in 2023, I have applied to present again in 2024. Stand by for something a little different from me, if it gets accepted. The Call for Papers is still open, if you want to apply. Cornish lessons have finished for the year. The ‘progress’ doesn’t really warrant a post of its own but after thirty hours of lessons, I have a reasonable vocabulary but still zero ability to turn that into sentences.

Then there is the house not moving. There have been several weeks of, let’s be honest, zero progress and being told on all sides that the housing market is the slowest since, well since I last moved house. You want the housing market to slow down? Call on me, I’ll decide to move. Suddenly though, there is a slight chink in the armour and I have a viewing on my property, as do the people who are frantically trying to sell theirs in order to buy mine. Cue a manic cleaning/tidying/gardening spree. Fortunately, this coincides with the arrival of one portion of my descendants, so I can kill two cleaning/tidying birds with one duster. Unfortunately, it also coincides with the visitation of no fewer than three plagues of flying ants. What’s all this ‘they only swarm once a year’ lark? Please could someone inform my local flying ants of this ‘fact’. I still have to dispose of the bodies from round three.

The gardening is another matter. Having been bitten by an unidentified flying insect, I stepped in a deposit ‘kindly’ provided by a neighbouring cat. Said cat and I are already not friends, as it has been catching birds in my garden. I know, I know, it is what cats do but it isn’t pleasant to see it make off with a bird in its mouth. I don’t know what this cat had been eating but boy did it smell. I can still image that smell a day later. Then there was the tree felling. A couple of tree branches were getting dangerously near to the overhead electric cable. Dilemma. Do I risk a serious electrical incident, or do I send an aging fisherman of my acquaintance ten foot up an extremely wobbly ladder because, said fisherman insists, I do not need to get a tree fella in to be a tree feller? We went for the latter option and I just shut my eyes and hopped about in the garden minus my poo-laden shoe. All is well and I would like to put on record for the benefit of the F-O-M-A’s nearest and dearest that I did tell him it wasn’t a good idea. It did take rather a lot of time and energy that I was hoping to spend on other garden tidying but hey ho. Today is the time for duster, mop and bucket and a request for all the positive vibes you can muster, so that I can move on to the next chapter.

A photo because (sorry cat lovers) birds are better than cats.

So still no progress on the moving house front. While I wait for a chain to complete underneath my potential buyer, I am trying to simultaneously put it all to the back of my mind and do something, so that I don’t feel totally impotent in the whole process. This means that I am working round the house triaging my possessions, in the hope of being less crowded in a new property and saving the removal men from having to lug a load of stuff, at my expense, that I really don’t need. The progress so far is: garden sheds tick, bathroom (not much of a challenge) tick, conservatory (apart from the children’s books which are awaiting said children) tick, my bedroom tick. This week it was time to start on the difficult stuff, the two bedrooms that contain between them eleven full height book cases (well, actually ten and two half width ones). That is an alarming sixty six shelves worth. Two of these bookcases are built in and I’d like to lose the two narrow ones, or relegate them to the garage. That means I need to find eighteen shelves of books that I can live without.

First stop the history books, six shelves of these. I tried to take a critical look. Most were acquired in the late 1970s and early 1980s they have accompanied me on three or four house moves. The vast majority of them haven’t been opened for at least forty years and if I am honest, some of them weren’t read even then. Why am I giving them house room? That’s one and a half shelves gone. Next half bookcase, local history of places other than Devon. This was harder but some more joined the ‘to be disposed of’ pile. Two book cases didn’t make much of an impact as one narrow one is seventeenth century social history and I need those. The other is family history research files rather than books, so that all stays. That left two book cases in that room still to do.

Two shelves of social history first, reduced to one and a half. Now it was getting really tricky. Next were family history books and the Devon local history books. I decided that I really didn’t want forty six years of back numbers of a family history society journal. I don’t think I have looked at back numbers more than once. Fortunately someone else was pleased to take these off my hands. Another, shorter, run from a different society also hit the ‘to be humanely disposed of’ pile. A bit of rearranging and one of the narrow bookcases was now empty, the equivalent of three shelves. I am trying not to think of the other fifteen that I need to free up.

Many of the family history books are 1990s vintage. Although the sources don’t change, the techniques do. More of these have been referred to in the past few years but some, like other items consuming shelf space, have not been opened since they were unpacked from my previous house move seventeen years ago. Out they go. I am on a roll. Still to do, the two shelves of Devon local history, I suspect I will be keeping most of those. Then it will be on to the six bookcases in the spare bedroom. These were culled during lockdown but I have hopes of significant weeding when I get to the three and a half book cases of fiction. I know some date from the sixties and early seventies, when there was a fashion for very tiny print that I can no longer read. If I started now I doubt I have enough life left to read all these again. I will be seriously asking myself how likely I am to read each one and hopefully there will be a pile to move on to charity shops.

There are of course also two banana boxes of children’s books under the spare bed. I haven’t even thought about what I do with those. Many are paperbacks that have lost their glue so the pages are loose and my grandchildren have very different reading tastes. I know that these really should go too but I may not be in the right frame of mind for that just yet. I will report on my progress – just wait until I get to the extremely full loft!

Image Peggy Marco Pixabay