How are your New Year resolutions going?

My major resolution, which goes back a few years but tends to lie dormant until I bring it out and dust it off every January, is to declutter – to get rid of the sheer excess of stuff I own.  

My resolution tends to fizzle out early on when I contemplate where to start: clothes, books, kitchen drawers, shed, CDs, or – horror of horrors – photos? 

Clothes is probably the category most under control.  I’ve got a new rule which says buy something new, chuck out something old.  Even so, it’s hard to part with stuff you’ve had for years, even if you’ve outgrown it (which tends to happen as you get older) or you just don’t like it any more. 

Actually, make that two new rules about clothes.  The other one is, if I haven’t worn if for over two years, out it goes.  Or if I’ve never worn it, which does happen sometimes, like with the colourful short-sleeved hand-embroidered cotton jacket I bought a few years ago on my travels.  It looked pretty and exotic in the Persian souk, but it’s just a smidgin too ethnic for the streets of Hobart.  

Here’s a good hack for getting rid of clothes:  I take and keep a photo of each garment I plan to chuck.  That way I feel as if I’m somehow honouring our sentimental connection.  This system works well except that after having its photo taken the garment goes into a big bag along with others destined for Vinnies or Lifeline, and during this period in clothing limbo there’s always the possibility I’ll pull it out, decide I can’t break up with it after all and restore it to drawer or wardrobe.  But I’m trying to toughen up here.

My female readers will know what I mean.  Blokes are probably thinking: what’s the problem?  When it starts falling to bits I chuck it out.  Or my wife does.  Anything for a quiet life.  The big problem for blokes is what happens next, when it is decreed by the female half of the couple that a replacement must be purchased for that ancient, tatty, grimy jumper you’ve been wearing since the seventies.  It’s a well-known fact that most blokes hate shopping for clothes.  That’s certainly been my experience.  And I should say I’m talking here about straight blokes of my vintage.  I concede that younger fellas these days do take an interest in clothes, as do gay men of all ages.  

Books.  This is an issue that will resonate all round.  You know that scene in movies where the cops or spies raid someone’s house, take all the books off shelves and flick through the pages upside down to release any secret documents hidden within?  I’d like to see them try that at my place.  I have literally hundreds of books, more likely thousands, spread over nine substantial bookcases in five separate rooms.  

My friends say I need new carpet.  Of course I’d need to move the bookcases, which would mean taking all the books off, but here’s your chance, they say, to cull the books you know you’ll never read again or at all.  

Fat chance.  I’d rather swap jobs with Hercules.  I’ll clean out the Augean stables and he can do my books.  

I’ve set aside a small fabric bag into which I’m putting books I’m happy to let go.  There are exactly four in it.  Four down, 3,789 to go.  Even then I find it a wrench.  It’s as though once a book takes up residence on my shelves it acquires a certain moral or legal right to be there.  And the longer it stays, the stronger its tenancy claim becomes and I feel bad about evicting it.  Every once in a while I come across a second copy of a book.  Bliss!  I can definitely give that away guilt-free!  

Books are harder to dispose of than clothes.  You can take some to secondhand bookshops or give some away to charity or put some in those little street libraries, but whatever you do you still have to start by sorting through them to decide which ones to keep and which ones to toss.  And that’s a giant hurdle.  A hurdle bigger than the bumps and lumps in my carpet.  

So for the time being the carpet and the books are reprieved.  Maybe I’ll start on those photos instead…..