Your Letters: November 18

We all live in little boxes, some bigger than others, all filled with collected stuff, and some have more stuff than others, stuff accumulates with time and fortune, and as the years roll by, stuff that was bought falls into disrepair or out of use, stuff given and never used, and stuff bought when out and about as souvenirs and stuffed into cupboards and never seen again.

Charity shops accumulate good useful stuff that others don't want, so people can buy very cheap stuff to take back to their little boxes and use, and so the cycle of stuff continues in ever widening circles.

With the boss out with one of our daughters for some serious retail therapy, it fell to me to trawl through 46 years of accumulated stuff that has been squirrelled away in cupboards and drawers, and forgotten.

Where do you start? Drawers full of old letters, brochures for stuff that is as old as the hills, boxes of tat and cheap household implements, bought and never used, reams of paper work from banks and building societies, and clothes. Yards of cotton and woollen clothes, in every colour and pattern made by man, all now out of fashion, and all far to small, even found some of the kids baby clothes, and our youngest is 36.

So here's the conundrum, what to bin, give to the charity shop, and what to keep? giving that herself and I are well into extreme upper middle age, or as one of our offspring commented "Pops you're getting far to old and doddery for climbing about on ladders" for me it would all be binned, however if I threw out the baby clothes, I can guarantee that my life would hang by a thread, and I have to sleep at some point, probably in the shed, and she knows where the knife draw is.

My main worry is that when we both become worm bait, the kids will have the awesome task of sorting through a massive collection of memories, her huge china collection, my books, and all the stuff I collected when out and about working all over Albion, and abroad. The lads get all my tools... what?... Well would you really want your old lady waving about a jigsaw, or disk cutter, and what lady do you know that could handle a big industrial Hilti drill, electric jack hammer, or for that matter a chain saw. It has to be the lads.

Now, many moons ago my old sainted grey headed old mum, still firing on all cylinders at 92, rocked up here at Levy Towers with a box of her memories, stuff that was her mothers, much of it well over a hundred years old, cut glass, and a host of small bits and pieces, some brought over from the old country, when mums grandparents escaped the czars Cossacks back in 1903. Add all this stuff to our collection of stuff, and the kids will have four generations of collected stuff to show their children, along with their histories, throw in the old photos that go back to 1876 of my great grandparents, and our grandchildren will have stuff to show their grand children, a family history stretching back hopefully nearly 200 years.

Binning yesterday's newspapers we do without thought, binning family stuff is a problem, do I throw out history, and more to the point, do today's youth have any interest in their past, or where they came from, and what troubles and cataclysmic events brought their ancestors to these shores?

Our box of stuff will now have to wait to be sorted, as I have to think long and hard what goes, and what stays, and according to the boss, a house full of stuff she can handle, as she says "You're the problem, you can go." Lads, how many times I have we heard that.

Tony Levy, Wednesfield

EXPLAIN POINT ON ALLOWANCE

My immediate reaction to Peter Rhodes’ column on 6 November prompts one question, which I’m afraid I can’t put kindly or politely.

Rhodes asserts that his winter fuel allowance has been taken by the chancellor and given to a train driver. 

I am of course open to be persuaded of Rhodes’ genius – and by extension that of Rachel Reeves, not a politician whom I admire – if he can explain the financial mechanism by which my £200 has been removed and transferred to the bloke at the front of the 11.41am West Midlands Railway service to Birmingham New Street.

Alan Harrison, Bloxwich

PRIVATE SCHOOLS POINT FLAWED

Chris Smith (letters, 4 November), must clearly be writing from a parallel universe if he thinks that free thinkers are educated in private schools. 

It is usually there that the brainwashing takes place, so that we get confronted by regiments of conformist graduates who think alike, talk alike and have the same sense of superiority over and contempt for the plebs as each other.

Let's consider the approach of none other than Rees-Mogg and Farage, both public schoolboys. Many are still way to the right of the current Tory party, such as it is.

The impact and influence of privately educated right-wing toffs like Rees-Mogg, Johnson, Farage and others, has had a negative influence on the UK for far too long.

Jon Dews, Dudley

Send us your letters for publication to [email protected]  

Letters to the editor must include the writer’s name and address and will only be published anonymously in exceptional circumstances. The editor reserves the right to condense or amend letters.