I found another article here on decluttering.

These are always worth a read, especially at this time of year when you suddenly get the urge to throw everything out. 

I'm not sure that it really has anything dramatically new to say, butit has some advice that is worth repeating, such as: "You don't have to be ruthless, but you do need to be dispassionate. Don't feel guilty about getting rid of something just because somebody gave it to you, or you spent a lot of money on it."

Harder said than done when you're a tightwad, of course. And the DH just a couple of weeks ago found a use for some things I sold two years ago - oops. 

More important perhaps is the link to Terence Conran's page on decluttering (I like the pictures here - it's how I fondly imagine I would live if I actually had some organisation and no cats). Although, again, the advice is familiar, one phrase did strike me:

"Anything that you are keeping on the off chance that it might either come in useful or become valuable one day. What is more useful and more valuable is the space that it is occupying"

Aha. Space is indeed useful and valuable, especially in Britain, where people live in the smallest houses in Europe, on the smallest plots of land. For instance, few people can really afford luxuries like a spare bedroom any more - far better to put a clic-clack in the dining room and turn the spare room into an ensuite - at least that way you get to actually use it. 

Maybe what we all need is gigantic lockups to put all our junk in, then when we're dead, all our rellies can come round and exclaim at the crap - or, as I did last night - cry out in wonder at the rackds of vintage clothing batty-as-a-fruitcake Cornelia Bailey had managed to amass in her Jacobean pile in Country House Rescue. I would have given my eye teeth to trawl through those two rooms, I tell you what...

New research conducted for the Prudential shows that more than 4.6 million adults in the UK have their former bedrooms preserved by parents who can't quite let go of their memories. 

A staggering 42% of UK adults whose parents still live in the family home say their former bedroom is still decorated as it was when they were a child, with 44% sleeping in their childhood bedroom when they return to see their parents. Many of them still have their childhood trophies and toys stored 'at home' and regard their childhood bedroom as still 'theirs'. 

Well how weird is that? Talk about arrested development. 

One of the virtues of coming from a dysfunctional family, I guess, is that it makes you grow up a bit quicker than that.

When I left for university, my dad converted my room into a clock-mending workshop practically before you could say knife.

It pissed me off somewhat, as I did technically own the furniture - they'd made me pay for it after a family snit. Remember the scene in 'Friends' where Ross's room has been kept like a shrine while Monica's has been turned into a gym? Sentimentality wasn't one of the Devine family faults, I'll say that for my father. 

The upshot, of course, was that I went back a few times, but since I never really felt like I had a 'home' to go to (and they also charged me rent), I soon knocked it off and stayed in town and worked.

This - to tell the truth - was probably exactly my Dad's intention. I'd hung on the longest, after all, in living at home to the age of 18, whereas my sister married at 17 and the two boys left at 16 and 15. When I went, I think he was glad that his parental responsibilities were finally done with and he could get on with the real love of his life - making clocks and hiding from my mum in the garage.

Just a quick blog this morning, as we are in the middle of an office move. 

In the usual Chinese puzzle fashion of our house, given that all the rooms are occupied, this has meant moving the bedroom into the sewing room, the office onto the landing, then the office into the former bedroom and the bedroom into the former office. And carting everything up a flight of very tight stairs with a bend in it. 

The house looks like a paper mill exploded inside it - I reckon we will cart at least five 120-litre sacks of rubbish out of the house, the vast majority of it paper - old magazines, old cuttings, old source material, out of date accounts...We do try to stay on top of it, we really do, and we aim to have big chuckouts twice a year, but all the same it builds up.  

It will be a while before the sewing room and landing are back to normal, but the weird thing is that we seem to have gained floor space everywhere, just by moving things around. Our old bedroom was enormous, but the new one is still very spacious and has the advantage of a huge cathedral ceiling, which we now lie looking up at - visual space rather than floor space.

Meanwhile, the office - the former bedroom with its low ceilings - has so much more floor space that we've been able to create a seating area for coffee breaks, and allow for much more shelving. Strangely enough, even the landing seems huge now that we've moved our giant daybed into the bedroom and tucked it under a beam - in the new bedroom it seems unobtrusive, but on the landing it was like a whale in a teapot. 

Just goes to show you, you can live in a place for 11 years and still find you've been doing it all wrong.