The Great Clear Out has been taking me to some odd places this week. In the wildest of my dreams, I was hoping that I would be able to move my desk this week, although that was always a bit of a fanciful notion. As it turned out I am still some way from that happening, even if there are holes beginning to appear in box mountain, the area at the back of the living room that I'm planning to move into.
Out attentions have been on the shed, where I had six crates of magazines stashed away. They were never meant to be there for long, but, like my temporary image on FB, the person I sold them to before we moved back in 2010 never came to collect them (or, indeed, pay for them). I sold some of them off on eBay a few years ago for more than what I was offered for their outright sale, so I'm not going to complain.
The end result is that I'll have a few crates free for things I do want to keep either for myself or for later sale, and the mountain will start to shrink. Once that's out of the way, I'll be able to finally figure out the best way to fit in the desk and my computer and scanner, move numerous boxes into the space currently in use by the desk, and then, maybe... just maybe... I can start thinking about replacing my rattling, clunky computer with something a bit more up-to-date. Thankfully, the sale of books over the past few weeks, plus the extra bits of work I have been doing since spring, probably mean I can now afford something reasonable.
I am still working, although it feels like it's at a painfully slow rate. Mostly down to bad printing in the original comics, but also all the distractions that are going on at the moment. I'm enjoying some longer walks as Mel has had another week off, using up holiday that built up during the Covid lockdowns, and we're making the most of the weather and the fact that we can get out a little later when things have warmed up a bit. We hadn't walked along the tow path for a while and had two surprises. One was that someone has abandoned a boat on the river bank that they've tried to destroy but failed. You can see the prow has been set fire to and parts of the boat have been stripped. I have seen abandoned boats along the river before, one rowing boat that is still there, slowly being broken down by weather and plantlife, and I remember something that looked like a burnt out Viking boat, which was eventually removed.
The second surprise was that the council have closed down the Wivenhoe Trail, a track that links the town to Colchester via the Hythe, in order to resurface it. Presumably this is being done for the cyclists who come racing along it like it's a cycle path, which it isn't. My one complaint is that modern bikes — or maybe just modern cyclists — don't have bells on their bikes, so the only warning you get that someone is tearing up behind you is the rattling of the bike on the stones. A nice tarmacked surface will mean we won't know they're coming. (If you're looking for evidence that I've turned into a grumpy old man, this is for you!)
And while I'm on the nature trail, our walk back through the park means that we're seeing the changes in all the trees as they start taking on their glorious autumn colours. Which is where I'm going to leave you for this week. Hopefully there will be some actual news next week.
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