It’s a little over a month to go before we move and we’re still finding stuff we’d forgotten we had. Who’d have thought we’d still have a VHS player lurking in a cupboard? Just as well – I’ll be able to play a few rare tapes that I saved at the back of the DVD cabinet.
We’re doing our best to recycle Stuff. After all (clears throat) one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Though I think for some things the wave of technology has crashed over the top and carried on without them. Second hand shops are full of VHS tapes, BETA tapes (remember them), those little cassette tapes you used to put into the player at the front of your boom box, CDs, and all the various iterations of DVDs. These days everybody uses Spotify and streaming services. We’ll keep some; The Goon Show on cassette, cartoon versions of a couple of Pratchett books on VHS, the extended editions of LOTR and the Hobbit on DVD – and a whole bunch of DVDs we haven’t even watched.
I wonder if any of those old formats will return like vinyl has? I confess I don’t understand why vinyl recordings are meant to be better. Maybe somebody can explain.
The next major task is going to be to decide which books to keep. Both of us have pretty much converted to on-screen reading but we’re still finding it hard to part with the paper books. My collection of hard cover Terry Pratchetts is a no-brainer. But do I really need an enormous Oxford English dictionary dating back 30 years? Or my rather large collection of gardening books? Maybe a couple aimed at small gardens. I’ve fished out my 1970-80s Women’s Weekly and Margaret Fulton cook books (complete with stained pages) for the new kitchen. But I’ll get rid of quite a few others that I rarely if ever used. Jamie Oliver’s thirty minute meals, for instance. None of them were even close to the time frame, especially if you included the clean-up – besides, you can find them online. But I’m hoping at least some of the many reference books gracing our shelves will find homes somewhere else.
Meanwhile, life goes on. We still see the birds, although not so often, as we’ve… not stopped feeding them, but certainly reduced. The bird bath remains popular and there are always takers for bacon rind, leftover stew, and cooked rice. As the weather warms, the callistemons and eucalypts are coming into flower. Even if we don’t see many lorikeets, we can certainly hear them in the surrounding trees and bushes.
We’ve had the occasional unusual visitor to the garden and although we’ve seen king parrots here before once or twice, this pair arrived late one afternoon. They came right under the veranda and approached me – so I think they were tame birds that someone would be missing. They’re magnificent, aren’t they?
I’ll miss the birds.