My family are hoarders of stuff.

I've been like this for as long as I can remember. Just look at any house I have lived in, any room I inhabit, and you will see piles and collections of stuff. At least now I am generally more tidy about my collecting than I used to be. I can at least function in my collecting spaces.

I use the term "squirrel" to describe myself rather than "pack rat" because one of the things squirrels do with the nuts they collect is to hide them and then forget where they put them. Most of the things I forget are left to moulder, until I eventually rediscover them and throw them away.

There are exceptions.

When I moved to the States, my old computers got shovelled into the attic of my parents' house. There was my old Acorn Atom (with power supply, but no software), my Amstrad CPC 464 (with its floppy drive and some considerable number of game tapes), and my Acorn Archimedes (complete with its massive 45Mb hard disc and the 2Mb RAM expansion). There was also a manky old Gateway PC, but that was known to be broken when I stopped using it, and an obsolete Toshiba laptop which was no use to anyone any more.

Well, one of my tasks when we were in Britain in March was to clear my stuff out of my parents' attic. This I did, most of it being thrown away including these old computers. There was no reasonable way I could get them home (and what would I do with them if I did?) and I didn't have time to arrange sale, so I couldn't think of anything else to do with them.

I have read in Zee's blog recently about how liberating it has been for her to dispose of old stuff, but I do not feel liberated now. I feel bereft, like I threw away part of my life. Which is not objectively true, but I spent a lot of time working on those computers over the years I owned them. They were how I learnt to program, where I picked up videogame skills, what I learnt to write and type on. They were a huge part of my life for a long time.

They're gone now and there's nothing to be done about it, but I am still appalled that I did that. In some sense they were friends and they did not get a good burial.

Posted by Dunx at August 19, 2005 07:27 AM