Oh, rubbish.

While my in-laws have been on holiday, I've been filling up their wheelie bin, as well as our own, every week. See, I've finally got around to clearing out the guest room (also known as the "crap room"), which I filled up with, well, crap, when I cleared out the old crap room, which is now my study/knitting room. We moved into this house, oh, three years ago, and I am just now finishing opening the last of our moving boxes. They were full of useless crap, for the most part, which is why they were able to sit there, peacefully gathering lots of dust, for the last three years. I have now condensed most of the crap down into five much smaller boxes, which I will go through at my leisure, and that surely means they will sit in the guest room, vaguely irritating me and gathering dust until we actually have houseguests about to arrive, when I will probably just pitch them into our bedroom for the duration.

You see, I am slowly and reluctantly coming to the conclusion that my husband will never see the error of his packrat ways. Our house will never be entirely free of clutter. We live in an Edwardian semi-detached house that, while lovely and very spacious, is completely lacking in closets. As in, there are none. I'm not exaggerating for effect. We have NO built-in closets, and only two free-standing wardrobes, both of which are packed to bulging already. Add to this the fact that every single radiator is stupidly located, the doors and windows and other furniture take up almost all of the remaining wall space, and we have thousands and thousands of books (none of which, no matter how crappy, stupid and unlikely ever to be read again they are, will he consent to give or throw away) on many large space-hogging bookshelves, and it would be fair to deduce that we will never have any more wardrobes.

He really doesn't see this as a problem. You should see his office. Part of the reason his office is such a fright is that I have taken to throwing the piles of crap he leaves in the rest of the house into it. If it were solely up to me, I swear to god, we would hire a skip tomorrow and toss out tonnes of what I consider rubbish, and what he considers potentially useful, or has some other highly idiosyncratic reason for not wishing to pitch. I love to read, and I love books, and I look at our overflowing bookshelves, and I am seized with the almost overwhelming desire to build a bonfire in the back garden. Don't get me wrong; very many of these books are mine, and in most cases, I, too, am reluctant to part with them. I sympathise with his acquisitive and possessive nature where books are concerned, since I share it, too. But if I find one more crappy airport thriller stuffed in a box, I think I'm going to start screaming hysterically and not stop until the men with the butterfly nets come and drag me away.