Normal for Norfolk..........: Time it was and what a time it was it was A time of innocence a time of confidences Long ago it must be, I have a photograph Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you. Paul Simon (Bookends)

We keep finding that in deciding to carryout one project a chain of actions is initiated requiring us to do several other tasks first.

Let me give you an example....

We wanted to paint our smaller bedroom in the main house.

This had an old Ikea bed in it which really needed upgrading to a new one so we decided to keep the old bed and put it into one of the very small rooms that are hidden away at the back of our house. It could then be a spare bed for occasions when we have a full house.

Pretty straight forward so far then. Mmmm, unfortunately the 'box room' that this bed was intended to go into was full of many boxes that had been there since we moved in two years ago waiting to find their final destination.
For example all of my old photos (taken over the last 40 years) many of which I have been waiting to find time to organise and one day to scan into the computer.
The camping stuff, tents, sleeping bags and whatnot. It is true that Alison is very unlikely to agree to ever camp again and that the zip on the big tent is stuck open so we have to rely on the fly-sheet's zip to give us any privacy at all. The lilos date back to the 1980s and the garish patterns look like it too. My heart still tells me that I am "Bear" Grylls and that I am born to be wild whilst my body tells me that I'm more like Godfrey in Dad's Army and I'm born to nap! So we keep the camp stuff then on the pretence that the kids will use it one day but in reality it is to keep me thinking I'm still young and able to 'live on the edge', Ha!

Then there is the general 'stuff', you know, the stuff that you don't know why you are keeping it but you just do and the place it all lives is in the attic along with the Christmas decorations and the stamp collections. Oh and the wedding dress of course. A word to the wise on the subject of the wedding dress, firstly DO NOT feel it necessary to enquire why your wife wishes to keep it.... she just does alright! Secondly, what ever you say DON'T point out that "You can't possibly still squeeze into it anyway". Just let it be, consider it to be her equivalent to your camping stuff, a reminder of youthful times lost in the swamp of life.

So any way if we are to fit the old bed into this backroom then we need to move that stuff out which is why I got my builder to make a loft hatch into the main house's attic as it never had one before. That then meant the next part of the chain reaction was to move this stuff into the loft. Only we can't because the loft is very old and having never been used for storage in it's 250 year history there are no boards up there just 5 key roof rafters and all the rest only support the lathe and plaster ceilings below.

And so follows the next part of the chain which is to create a strong area in the loft by securing cross beams firmly to the strong rafters and then board across them. Then we can move all that stuff into the attic, only we can't because despite my boarding it would be too heavy to move it all, so we need to sort through it all first ideally losing some. Also there are some items that we need to be able to get our hands on without climbing into the attic (the entrance is in one of the guest rooms). This means freeing up the 2nd back room which is full of the children's hoard of crap.... sorry cherished possessions. So the 30 plus boxes of that stuff has to be done first.

And when this has all been accomplished then we can slap some paint on the wall of that small bedroom that we started the blog with some many hours ago!

The only way we could sort through all of our junk was to take it from the back room, place it in the living room and work through it a box at a time. With all of the boxes stacked up it looked for all the world that we had just moved in......

Box by box memories were opened and decisions made. Gosh we had some rubbish. I decided to tackle a large apple box full of envelopes of printed photos and their negatives dating back to the late 1970s. I sorted through some 60 packages, looking at every single photo to decide if it should stay or should it go?
The net result was that I threw away 2,040 photographs! If you know me at all you'll know this was a real breakthrough and I am quite proud of myself. That said I still have at least 3,000 slides to decide upon and at least a further 2,000 more photographic prints to sort through and that is not including the 7 apple boxes full of photo albums. I won't be throwing them away because they are full of the really special pictures.

Ok, ok, I think I may have an addiction or compulsive disorder now that I step back and look at this through a sane persons eyes. I know that I probably have a further 10,000 photos stored on my hard drives from the new digital age, cor this is getting scarey now. Sadly all of these do not include the many deleted digital photos that I took. I know that my first digital camera turned the 'clock' or counter and as this reverted to zero after 10,000 photographs I can be sure that was how many times I pressed the button.

My goodness, I seriously need some professional counseling or something don't I? It is so clearly an addiction that I need to break now I look at it. You see I am constantly looking for that special picture... The one, but I never ever find it.

I will end this blog with some of those pictures that have got close to what I am striving for and please pray that I get over this 'problem', thank you.