Out of sight, out of mind

Eventually the out of sight out of mind principle fails completely. In the four and half years we have been here, or thereabout, we have accrued a fair amount of tat and broken items, the majority of which have been put places where they are no trouble. Some in fact have been moved several times to new no trouble places, like my priceless collection of not really broken bikes, all of which with only a few days effort and several hundred pounds would be as good as new. These have been moved from almost barn to the workshop, to the shed that then was demolished and became the Berner Annexe so they then went to to tack room before ending up in the almost barn again where for a few months they have been the favoured playthings of the pigs. The pigs showed very little aptitude for bike mechanics, instead they just copied me and moved them around their domain in a seemingly aimless fashion.
So, having decided that the towering piles of really useful stuff at the back of the stable/house/garden/greenhouses/workshop were now so high that they posed risk to life and limb I conceded that a skip would be a useful item because we might just have enough to fill a small one. Tracey my beautiful and oh so patient wife ordered the largest small one they hire out and ignored my comments of "its a barn, we'll never fill it" (sic Blues Brothers, still the best film ever made) And so the attempt to fill it with my precious things began yesterday (when not chasing cows) and several discoveries were made. Frogs had made a passable home in the box that the trout had arrived in last year and was put for safe keeping behind the stable on the premise that one day I might need a cardboard box that I could carry fish in. No such occasion has arisen and so it is now in the skip. The frogs leapt for freedom once they saw the eviction notice was final.

This amazing radio which is over 15 years old and has been on several expeditions with me, lived in the same places as the bikes except that it was in the eaves of the pig sty. Tracey had put it in the skip, I seized the opportunity to turn it on to prove it was not rubbish bit a precious thing, it remained stubbornly silent. An aha look swept across my beautiful and oh so patient wife's face but she watched ever so patiently as in desperation I rummaged aound and found an almost fitting electric cable. Plugged in and switched on with a stick, just in case, however the only shock was that Radio 2 blared across the yard. Reprieve granted it was allowed back in the tack room. One small victory to hoarders!

By yesterday evening the skip looked like this, full of good stuff from the garden, almost barn, back of stable and tack room and contained compulsory skip items like a broken ironing board. Today the main thrust of attack was the workshop. I was too embarrassed to publish a before the great clear out picture but this is it by nightfall and the skip is, ahem, slightly fuller. This picture shows the location of my "little accident" where I fell from the gallery (no stairs or safety rail at the time, and funnily enough as it happens, no ladder, just gravity, a lot of pain and near asphyxiation caused by a helpful Bernese called Rocky who tried to keep me warm while waiting for the ambulance ) had I fell this morning I would have missed the concrete floor and fallen about two feet onto stuff. I am trying not to think about the 400 or so cd's that were deemed surplus to requirements, and the countless numbers of model soldiers (or little men as my better half calls them) cast aside and now reside skipside. What I am concentrating on is the huge workspace now created, the large number of tools "found" and best of all finding all the photographs had been spared the attentions of mice, unlike a lot of my books and comics which seem to have made excellent nests.
Tomorrow we are launching an attack on the upstairs gallery, rumour has it there are boxes that have lain undisturbed since we first got here. Bound to be full of stuff I really need!