My failed attempts to declutter

I’m a wealthy man. Filthy rich. Stinking with it. Look at this bag full of treasure. And these are just a few offcuts, some bits and pieces. Loose change. Here, a shoal of grayling in the River Wye between two bands of pristine green ranunculus. The delicate fairy-fish shimmer silver like the flutter of first love, tickling the belly of the river. There are plenty more where that came from, tucked away in unlabelled boxes at the back of my mind. I don’t need them all. You know what they say. ‘You can’t take it with you.’ Oh, and this. I’d forgotten I even had it. The moment a sparrowhawk, a big female, strong colouration, flicks over and extends her talons. Time freezes for the photo-finish but she misses by a gasp. A single yellow piece of fluffy blue-tit down hangs in the air like a cricket umpire’s ponderous adjudication. ‘Not Out!’ Life and death change ends and the next over¹ begins. Ach, I’ve got a trunkful of these in the loft. You take this one. Please.

Grayling - ‘the lady of the stream’. Rostislav Stefanek (Shutterstock)

Yes, I’m a wealthy man and, between you and me, weighed down with the guilt of it. The piles of synaptic snapshot visuals - I tried to give those away to charity shops. But apparently there isn’t much call for them these days. And they can only store so much stuff. Have to keep the stock turning over. The longer-term assets, the bonds and futures, the lark song baptising the fell anew each spring, the fishy sweetness of otter spraint – I thought I’d put those into a charitable trust, appoint trustees to oversee their distribution. The powers that be took a dim view. Mustelidae faeces, apparently, do not comply with modern sanitary standards.

In desperation I took to the streets, sat on a double-folded sheet of cardboard in an old jacket fastened with string and tried to give everything away. The passing dogs, eye-to-eye, were all for it. Couldn’t get enough. But their owners tugged on their leads and told them to leave it. The young people, the people we used to call children, came by after school. That was the worst of it. The tell-tale signs of deprivation. The shiny clean shoes. Soft hands. The loss of peripheral vision. A flight of Jackdaws descending onto the remains of a fish supper did not turn a single head.

Jackdaw. Remus Rigo (Shutterstock)

I said, ‘Cup your hands, as if you were praying, but open them just a little, like a mussel when it is feeding.’ I wanted to pour in a drop of cloud-shadow over the hillside mixed with fox-pad tracks. Some syrup of weasel spiced with the dark disputation of tawny owls.

But they didn’t know how to pray to these old gods. Had not heard of a mussel’s murky mouthing. Besides, their hands were full of a pied piper’s magic and their eyes would not stray far from it. Their fingers danced and twitched and could not have made a seal. A mountain stream’s clear waters would have simply flowed out of their hands onto the pavement.

I slunk off home, my tote bags of joyful memories as full as they ever were. But I have no intention of giving up. This weekend I’m having a garage sale. I’ll put a box of freebies out next to the pavement. A snatch of woodcock roding at dusk. A ripple of snipe as he unzips the sky. A chiding of oystercatchers before daybreak. That’ll bring them in.

---

Dedicated to Susie Mawhinney - who does a far better job of sharing miracles with young people than I ever will.

---

1. There may be people reading this who are not familiar with the game of cricket. The manner of play and the associated terminology are a bit eccentric. I am no expert but suffice to say that an ‘over’ is a series of six attempts by the bowler to dislodge the batsman from his wicket, excluding ‘wides’ and ‘no-balls’. After an over is complete the batsmen stay where they are but the fielding team repositions to bowl from the other end of the ground. The umpires traditionally stand perfectly still, like sleeping horses, until called upon to announce a decision, which they signal by a gesture of the arm, in their own good time, as if contemplating some deep philosophical conundrum.