Comic Cuts — 7 October 2022

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.

We've removed 13 boxes of books from the house so far. We also finally disposed of a box of old wires, a (non-working) DVD player and a video player that I'm pretty sure was still working, but cost me £30 second-hand thirty years ago, so I think I've had my money's worth. I have been selling odd bits 'n' bobs through Facebook and eBay where I think they might be (a) worth a bit, or (b) worth keeping in circulation, even if I don't get much for them. So lots of Captain Britain and a couple of Discworld collectables in the former category, and a couple of my own books in the latter. There's a link to eBay in the column on the left which you might like to keep an eye on. And you can easily find me on Facebook — I'm the Steve Holland with the Captain Hurricane pic, which I stuck in temporarily when I joined FB many years ago and never got around to replacing.

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.

Anyway, there were a lot of old film mags that nobody wanted that I'd shoved back into the crates, thinking that maybe, one day, I'd get around to selling them. But, frankly, I now need the space, so I've dumped 300 or so copies of Empire, Premier, Sight and Sound and others into the recycling. I've saved a few TV mags and I'll shortly be flogging those off cheap. Again, I hate to see anything go to waste if there's someone out there who wants it.

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.