A Load of Rubbish

The architect who did our Quinquennial Inspection back in June counselled us to seek the advice of a structural engineer about the floor-loading capacity of the loft over the church hall built in the 1980s. In common, I suspect, with your loft if you have one, the church's attracts junk. It is not the only space that does so: the Choir Vestry has also been treated as though it is an infinitely expandable space, and dumped with stuff nobody can quite bear to throw out to the extent that, even if we had much of a choir, it would be hard to fit them in it.

This is something of an inevitable process. The tempting voice that whispers in your ear that 'it would be a shame to get rid of X' or 'Y might come in useful' is not actually that wide of the mark. It may take some time to discover that something isn't going to be used again: that those empty boxes that you didn't make use of for Messy Church and kept just in case (which is partly what you can see in the photo) actually won't be making an appearance any time soon. Sometimes you may not know at first that a particular activity has come to a permanent end and not a temporary one, and so that box of paints and brushes, for instance, is going to sit in a dark corner for 20 years until they are completely incapable of being used. Time tells. When it comes to junking stuff, virtually everything could be of use to someone, but your chance of finding that person might be vanishingly slim. They could be in Ulaanbaatar which is not a lot of good. So a skip was hired, and sits being gradually filled at the house of one of the churchwardens.

The most jarring ambiguities come with old books. I found a little stack of varied copies of the Book of Common Prayer and it certainly goes against the grain just to send these to a skip, but the sad truth is that these are not all that rare: once upon a time pious Anglicans in their hundreds of thousands would have had them, and frankly nobody wants them now. Out they must go. Strangely enough, being a museum curator made me quite ruthless when you might expect it would have the opposite effect: I suppose it gave me an appreciation of the sheer quantity of stuff human beings have produced, and the impossibility of preserving it all. Instead it was precisely the destruction of things that gave surviving stuff its value. 

Examining the loft, and other places, I found:

• A suitcase containing ladies' shoes left over from a tabletop sale
• A xylophone
• A pot full of gravel
• A stack of very home-made wooden easels
• A pottery Nativity set which hasn't been touched in two decades - too delicate for handling and too nasty for best
• A set of speakers labelled 'Wives Group' which seems to have nothing to do with the Wives Group
• A box of Victorian school log-books which should be in the Record Office
• A headless statue of St Joseph - I did know this was there as it came from the Churches Together nativity scene which was vandalised several years ago. I remember people saying that the head might turn up: well, it hasn't. The statue would be about four feet tall if it still possessed its head

- but no sign, probably thankfully, of a Golem.