Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Monday, April 29, 2002

Lessons learned from April 1 to April 23 part 4:

The 9th: That whoever you are, whatever you are, wherever you go, you will never escape the fact that somebody else has had a chance to serenade screaming jailbait, and you haven't. Thank Christ. Giles, the crooner in question, is now a songwriter as well as a performer and has about the most flirtatious business card you can think of. This being part of a larger lesson involving always drinking too much at school reunions, for any number of reasons, and the advantages of having somebody around who does not remember the sinister cloisters of the alma mater to provide a) perspective and b) a place to stay.

And, on the first days of the month that, even if it isn't your home anymore, moving can be moving. My mother had finally decided to get the hell out of the family pile, a not unreasonable proposition given that the place was far too big for one person, and that it had suffered, and she with it, divorce, bereavement, a stodgy market for collectable special edition Babylon 5 plates and a good two decades of the East Midlands.

So, my father and I headed up to the family home to pile and sort and lift and carry and grunt and generally do manly things, culminating in an achingly Field-of-Dreams-esque montage of drinking beer from the bottle and watching the sun go down.

You uncover a lot of your history when scrubbing through the loft, and have to make some tough decisions. Out go the Dungeons and Dragons figures (even though Kenickie named their flame-red roadster Venger in honour of the skirt-wearing bad guy). Out go the Fisher-Price figures, thus banjaxing forever my plan to do a live-action Fisher-Price "Grapes of Wrath". But touch Boba Fett's ship and lose a fucking arm.

I think I need to raise my packrat bar very slightly. If I was a wee bit less of a packrat, having now disposed of everything right up to the shores of my current packrat quotient, I could throw out half my clothes, my entire vintage collection of 2000ADs, and a lot of old love letters.

But not books. That's always going to be an Achilles' heel.

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