"Spring Cleaning" in our house is a little bit late......

"Why don't you get rid of...................?"

Those of you who are regular followers of this blog will be aware that my good lady has been partially confined to home due to torn fibres in her collateral ligament. This has meant that she has been spending much of her spare time cleaning, tidying up, and generally pursuing me around the house with cries of "Why don't you get rid of....." "You could throw out all those..." "I'm going to the Martin House Charity shop why don't you give them........"



I'm not really a hoarder (my wife would disagree strongly) but from time to time I make the effort to prune the number of books, CD's, DVD's and Videos I have acquired, so it seemed like a good opportunity to weed out the "surplus to requirement" goods.

I've already made a start on the CD's, and managed to part with about 25 of them. You see the problem is I subscribe to Classic Fm Magazine, and each month I get a "free" CD. It's quite amazing how quickly the collection grows. Inevitably as I look down the track listings of a CD I will find that I want to keep it because of a single track. Then I think - "No, I'll get rid of that CD", then I begin to have doubts. Have I got another recording of the piece of music? Do I prefer the one on the first CD or the one on the second CD? If I chose to dispose of the second CD invariably there will be a different track on that one which I want to keep! - and so it goes on!

Now when it comes to disposing of DVD's and Videos, not quite the same problems apply. It's very rare that I have two versions of a film however examples do spring to mind - two Hitchcock versions of "The Man Who Knew too Much", three versions of "The Thirty Nine Steps", three versions of "The Phantom of the Opera", two versions of "The Wicked Lady"., but in each case the “duplicate” film is with a different cast. However, over recent months papers like the Telegraph and Mail on Sunday have taken to giving DVD’s away at a regular rate, and once again the number of DVD’s has grown at a rapid rate!



My only problem here is do I dispose of a video version of a film and replace it with a DVD version? Sooner or later video is going to become extinct! Just occasionally a DVD version of a film is not available.

As for books – I don’t know of any books which have “another version”, - so for books it seems to be much simpler – either keep it or ditch it!