Lofty Expectations

It has been three weeks of the most intense and frenetic activity, mentally and physically to get the house packed up and decent for the new owners.

After 28 months of being a public showcase, our willingness to sell our house displayed in flagboard form at the gate and with extensive script and photographically illustrated particulars of sale on the internet it really came down to just 21 days.

First big commitment in sheer effort was to clear the loft.

It is a spacious area.

We had, some 18 years prior, considered converting it into bedrooms and a second bathroom. It was a project and we always glanced upwards at the hatch cover upon passing under it every day imagining what it would be like. However, there is an informal terminology for it, one of those Laws along the lines of "if there is a big useful space it will always fill up with stuff" or something along those lines if I could think of anything witty and clever.

Sure enough, it became a seemingly endless void to receive willingly the old cot, surplus beds as the children grew out of them, reams of artwork from playgroup, pre-school, infants and juniors followed by stacks of exercise books from big school. As parents we were reluctant to throw anything away from the formative years of our three offspring. We did, after all, have plenty of storage for such important things.

In addition the loft became the dumping ground for the Christmas decorations. These increased year on year in amount and size. We even had a small treasure chest shaped wooden box exclusively for baubles plus two clear plastic trunks for the lights, tinsel, musical whimsies and ephemera plus a loose open bag for the assortment of wicker formed stars.

Other boxes made their way up there. It became a transit area for out of favour toys. Beanie Babies, for a few short years, regular purchases for birthdays, stocking fillers or as an easy exit strategy in gift shops whilst on holidays were particularly well represented in that half way house between being a constant companion for a small child and a radiator mascot on the council rubbish truck.

Those lovingly crafted and hand knitted dolls, angels, dare I say Golliwogs, teddy bears and amorphous forms took up further space following their persecution and demonisation by in the pursuit of Health and Safety. I can imagine the many hours spent by elderly ladies, Women's Institute members and friends of Grandma and Nanna to produce such individual gifts and their subsequent horror in being informed that they had actually created a choking, fire and toxic hazard putting at risk the lives of their loved ones.

I have a determined policy not to throw away books and so a few crate fulls of coffee table type presentations, works on the Royal Family, picture guides to the British Isles, Planes and Ships of the world began to add weight and volume to what was already in the loft. Every so often I would shift around the items to retrieve other things or out of concern if a particular bit of bedroom ceiling showed hairline cracks under the increasing tonnage.

The holiday suitcases took up another section, covered up with dust sheets in readiness for the once a year overseas trip.

Loose and random sized cartons filled in the gaps between larger items and these contained equally loose and random things. We had amassed an obscene amount of childrens toys and games but fully justified in the development of intelligence, co-ordination and the abilty of our youngsters to "play nice" with the other children.

Unfortunately most of the jigsaw puzzles had exploded from their boxes and pieces of scenes of Northumberland, Camberwick Green, London, Telly Tubby Land, the Scottish Highlands and steam trains at full speed had intermingled beyond reasonable effort to salvage.

Every year there emerged a must have piece of merchandise, Tracy Island, Furbies, Scooters, I lose consciousness thinking about them and how much was spent in the corpotate toy warehouses but they are all present in the lower eaves of the loft.

Fad, fashion and peer pressure play their part and as parents we must follow or be damned.

The same aisles of the huge emporiums threw forth those bulky square packages of board games. Nothing has really changed from my own childhood in that Buckaroo, Mousetrap, Operation, Hungry Hippos and Battling Tops are still being peddalled but in slightly tweaked lid graphics and more sophisticated Tv adverts to appeal to more sophisticated children but not enough to alienate reminiscent mums and dads. Such a game would have been clamoured for, our parents relentlessly nagged and cajoled from about August whereas nowadays it is nothing more than something to pad out the Santa Sack. In fact a bit of a manual amusement for kids brought up on electronic media.

Baby booties, first shoes and welly boots, Christening robes, blankets, best going out clothes, romper suits, bibs, winter coats and hats had all been carefully preserved and on being handed down the foldaway ladder to my wife were immediately raised to her nose to be sniffed to capture the essence of being a Mother. She soon thereafter had to resort to an inhaler from the ingestion of a decade and more of debris and grime that had permeated into the plastic bags, kicking off an asthma attack.

There were many, many other things in that loft. For brevity's sake we shall refer to them as miscellenea or just rubbish. Nothing really appealed as one of those chance discoveries of an antique or rarity category. I knew that anyway but you can always hope.

The thought of clearing out the roofspace had been a constant since putting the house up for sale in 2011. I had intended to do it over a Bank Holiday weekend, during any other short seasonal breaks or even just booking time off for work for the sake of getting it done. All the best laid plans.....etc.

The 21 days to legal completion was motivation enough and with a tentative prising open of the hatch cover and even more cautious lowering of a guillotine like ladder we gathered for the event.

Some decisions whether to keep or chuck were easy. The landing was like a resettlement area, seemingly the whole of our world on the move. We sniffed from suppressed emotion but mostly on account of the fine particles of dust which drifted down in the sunshine from the skylight in the slate roof. I happily wore an old policemans cap from the old dressing up box for the duration.

Over a three day period amounting to about 16 hours of accumlated labour the loft floor came into sight. It was a momentous discovery.

We had done it at last. The treasured items would accompany us on the move. The rest, which represented the largest proportion of the contents of the loft were stuffed crudely and disrespectfully into the large skip on the street outside and shortly to contribute to landfill.

The nicest knitted toys peered expectantly over the brim hoping for a lorry with a good flat radiator frontage on which to spend the rest of their days chewing flies.