Songs of Love

25th May 2010 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in No Comment

Pale, pubescent beasts
Roam through the streets
And coffee shops.

Their prey gather in herds
With stiff knee-length skirts
And white ankle-socks.

But while they search for a mate,
My type hibernate in bedrooms above.
Composing their songs of love.

Slow progress on the house. Initial draft contracts have been approved, and our solicitor has sent “Additional preliminary enquiries” on to the vendors, whatever that means. No news yet on an exchange date, much less a completion date. Ah well.

In the meantime, though, I’ve made a start on clearing out all the junk I’ve accumulated, both over the last 5 years living here, and in the years before. When we moved in, a whole bunch of stuff was chucked, still boxed, in the study. If I were being truly ruthless, I’d chuck it without looking through it. Fortunately though, I’m not quite that insane. There’s a whole bunch of stuff in there of interest:

  • 10 free tickets to Satan’s Hollow nightclub, Manchester (use by 31st December 2000). I went there for the grand opening and nearly knocked Richard O’Brien flying after drunkenly stumbling into him. He was utterly gracious about it. Good times.
  • Entrance tickets to Empire State Building, International Visitor’s Invitation to the US Senate, and assorted other stuff from the first time we went to America in 2002. Been back several times, to different parts of the country, and thoroughly enjoyed myself every time.
  • A large collection (upwards of 100) of “Free dial-up internet” discs. I started collecting these when they were common in the belief they might be valuable some day. In fifty years or so I’ll see if I’m right.

Stuff I won’t be keeping includes:

  • Every payslip I was issued, July 1999-June 2005. Puts what I’m paid now into perspective all right. Whether I’m underpaid now, or was then, or whatever, I’m amazed that I managed to survive on so little. Then I remember I survived by getting into huge amounts of debt I’ve only recently paid off. Time to shred these, I think.
  • Half a dozen assorted PCI and AGP video cards, along with a small mountain of other PC components, including a CD-Rewriter drive that must have cost me a week’s wages, and a DVD-ROM drive. There’s a couple of hard disks here too. One I can’t access and the other seems to be a backup of my PC Circa 2004. Straight to the bin for this little lot, except for an 802.11g WiFi PCI card I don’t remember buying. That might still be useful some day.
  • A Compaq T1500 Thin Client PC! For a short while this acted as a box to display video on my TV. Now there’s more processing power in my mobile phone.
  • A stack of videotapes. I’ve no idea what’s on them, not having owned a VCR in about four years.

Amazing the stuff that just gets put away in the belief it might come in useful some day. In recent times I’ve become a lot more pro-active about getting rid of unnedded cruft. Just as well, it seems. I’d have run out of space to live in if I’d ket accumulating it at the same rate.

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