"This is my life, I can't just throw it away," said an elderly woman in Radio 3's Between the Ears, the panic rising in her voice. She was in process of moving into sheltered housing, and the prospect of reducing her worldly goods was making her ill. She had, she explained, just spent three days in hospital.
It's just stuff, of course, this clutter that spills from our shelves and our cupboards and piles up on furniture and the floor. The day will come to us all when everything we have amassed in the course of our existence will be loaded into a skip, crushed to the size of a shoebox and become worm food in a landfill. I sincerely hope, when that day comes, to be worm food myself.
