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My mum had died just over six months ago and I had been more than reluctant to start going through her stuff. Ever since she had bought the big house, I had been dreading the moment. I knew that one day she would die and that I would be left having to sort out the mess. To say that mum had been a hoarder would be an understatement. Well, she wasn’t a hoarder in the clinical sense of the word. She wasn’t like one of those people you sometimes see on TV who have to clamber over mountains of tied up old newspapers and huge balls of plastic bags, stuffed with nothing but more plastic bags. No, she wasn’t like that, she didn’t hoard rubbish, it was all valuable stuff, well, trinkets, really: little Bavarian porcelain dolls with chubby cheeks and cocked green hats, pairs of lead crystal swans with elongated necks entwined, drawers and drawers full of mismatched antique silverware - you name it, it was there, in this house. Mum had always jokingly quipped: “You’ll have to get a skip when I die.” She thought that was hilarious. I never found it very funny at all, as I always knew it wouldn’t be just the one skip that would be required. It would be more like a dozen skips and weeks, if not months, of tedious sifting through it all, piece by piece in order to determine which bits to chuck and which ones to sell. “Did I not want any of it for myself?” my friends keep asking me. Well, the answer is no, not really, I have everything I want and more in my own place, and mine and mum’s tastes have always been diametrically opposite. She loved chintz and tat, expensive tat, but tat nonetheless. Every surface in her home had always been covered in stuff, every sofa overloaded with hand-embroidered cushions and doilies. Opulent Persian rugs now covered the stone and parquet floors in this country house that she had bought 15 years ago. But even before then, even before the money, before the short lived fame and the well invested fortune, when we lived in a two bedroom flat without central heating, even back then, she would fill every empty space by cramming more stuff into it. Just stuff, and I had been sick of it for a long, long time.
