Staying at my parents’ house while in my thirties, unable to bear it any longer, I once stole a plastic cupboard from their bathroom. It was a cheap freestanding thing, covered in stickers and filled with teenage gunk, which had become part of the landscape simply by hanging around too long. (Jenn Jordan, a professional home organiser I follow online, recommends taking a walk around your house with “fresh eyes”, trying to see things as a stranger might.) I chucked the cupboard and all of its buried treasures out.
My father was understandably upset about the dawn raid, as it wasn’t my home any more, and nobody had asked me to. He is very much a keeper of all the things. Yet the next day — and I was impressed by his grace in doing this — he told me he’d just walked into the bathroom and experienced a strange sense of peace.
How I wish, now, that I had held on to that winning streak and convinced him and my mother to move out of the family house altogether. It’s too late for that now, as he gets to approach his 92nd birthday in the detached house he knows and loves, and the rest of us get to hold our breath every time he goes near the stairs, and burst into tears every time we think about the garage, and the attic, and all that stuff.