The Weight of Clutter

We all own too much stuff. Most of us have books we read decades ago but have not picked up since, CDs we haven’t played for years, and clothes and shoes that we rarely wear, if ever. What we have is clutter, and a cluttered home makes for a cluttered mind. For me, clutter is like noise - painful and intrusive.

 

Over the years I have made efforts at decluttering, sorting through clothes, books, and CDs in a desultory fashion and disposing of a pitiful amount of stuff, the net result being only a minimal reduction in the clutter.

 

There are any number of decluttering tips to be found online, such as getting rid of two items for every one you acquire, and disposing of things you haven't used for a year. Marie Kondo, the Japanese professional organizer and consultant, has a principal that you should keep only those possessions that spark joy.

  

Marie Kondo

Some possessions can be hard to get rid of, especially those that hold sentimental value. It can be difficult to separate the possession from the memory, but discarding the possession does not mean that the memory is tarnished or lost. Or, we justify keeping things in the belief that what we now treasure will be similarly treasured by our children; having cleared out my mother’s house when she died, and that of my late mother-in-law, I can see that that is true of only a tiny number of keepsakes. 

Sometimes there is a powerful incentive to declutter, and Val and I recently encountered one: We moved house.

 

Moving house is one of the most stressful life events that we will ever undertake voluntarily, and our recent move was probably the most stressful of the six that I have made, even more so because it was our first for 25 years.

 

After a quarter of a century in our four-bedroom house we decided to downsize, what with our daughters having moved out. Our house was in desperate need of some TLC, crying out for a refit of both bathrooms, a new boiler, redecorating, and a complete overhaul of the plumbing, which had caused us no end of headaches over the years and cost us a shedload of money.

 

Val has always hankered after living by the sea, and some years ago a move to Eastbourne was mooted. I was reluctant, largely because I didn’t want to move somewhere that would make it hard to travel to watch my beloved Romford FC. Five years ago, we compromised and bought a flat in Eastbourne – I say flat, it’s actually a bedsit with a bed that folds into the wall – that we could visit whenever we chose. It proved to be a fortunate decision.

It might not look like much, but this is what we lived with for four months.

"Compact and bijou"

As for our permanent move, we chose Rotherhithe and a house close to the Thames. At our time of life, when most people decide to move outward from London’s suburbs, moving further into London did cause a few raised eyebrows, but after a few false starts, we found a house that we both loved, in a location that we found fascinating, and after finding a buyer for our property, put in an offer that was accepted. Now the fun started.

 

Since the sale of our property was advancing quickly, synchronising sale and purchase did not look possible, but we were keen to have as small a gap between the two as we could, and since the house we were buying was empty, the seller’s estate agents (who proved to be completely hopeless, unlike the agents dealing with our sale, who were excellent) assured us that we should be able to move in with minimal delay. The minimal delay turned out to be five months.

 

In the end, and in order not to lose our buyers, we agreed to move out and decamp to Eastbourne while our purchase proceeded. We packed up all the possessions that would move with us, and the removers took them away and put them in storage.

 

There were tough decisions to make deciding what we could keep and what we had to dispose of. There were multiple trips to charity shops to donate things, and many trips to the tip to throw away other stuff. Come completion day, and with the removers having taken most of our things a few days earlier, we attempted to pack the things we were taking to Eastbourne into the car. The only way it was all going to fit was if the car drove itself and so even just a couple of hours before we moved out, I was making trips to the tip with things that we could not transport. As it was, there was room in the car only for a driver so Val had to travel to Eastbourne by train.

 

When we unpacked at our flat there was a sense that we were trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot, even though we had brought just the essentials. Having moved out in mid-November 2024, we still harboured hopes that we would complete on our purchase by Christmas.

 

As Christmas approached, a bombshell dropped. The partners at the firm of solicitors acting for the seller were struck off and the firm went out of business. The sellers appointed new solicitors but we were effectively back to square one. A further complication stemmed from the property we were buying being on a private estate, with a management company involved.

 

The enquiries dragged on for weeks and our solicitors were finding it hard to get answers, so much so that by February we were contemplating abandoning the whole thing, going with our Plan B, and buying a house in Eastbourne as by now we had become pass masters at commuting up to London for gigs, football, and meeting friends, even though it sometimes entailed an overnight stay in a hotel.

 

Eventually, after much stress and compromise (mostly on our part, the seller was quite inflexible with a few proposals we made) we completed, having been in Eastbourne till late-March 2025. What our experience taught us was that we still owned too much stuff because as the weeks grew into months, we realised that we could live quite happily without many of our possessions. The only thing we really missed during our time in Eastbourne was broadband.

 

It was still a few days before our removers were able to deliver our furniture and other belongings, and when they did, we realised that our sofas and some other furniture would not really work in our new home and we had to ask them to dispose of them for us. Even then, having unpacked more than seventy boxes of clothes, books, CDs and other assorted possessions, we decided that in the interests of limiting clutter, lots had to go. Numerous trips to charity shops and the tip have followed.

 

These are very edited highlights of our moving experience, but one thing that I need to emphasise is how enlightening it was. Neither Val nor I expected to be living in a bedsit for four months, but it proved invaluable in teaching us what was important and what wasn’t. We feel much lighter and happier for the decluttering that circumstances drove us to and we are determined that we will not allow our new home to become messy and full of things that don’t add value. It will be an ongoing process, but one which we now feel much more capable of approaching effectively.

Virgin On The Ridiculous Part Four – The Netflix Debacle

I last wrote about my experiences with Virgin Media way back in April 2016 after their umpteenth unsuccessful attempt to connect my property (you can read about that, and VM’s previous attempts here). That, I thought, was that: It wasn’t.

 

I cannot now remember how I managed to get myself talked into another attempt to have Virgin Media installed– I’m sure it must have been they who initiated contact with me, and that in a state of bloody mindedness, I allowed them to have another go in the fairly certain knowledge that it would be an abject failure. If I knew then what I know now, I don’t think I would have bothered.

 

On the 30^th March 2017 two men arrived in a van, armed with a giant reel of cable and the optimism of men who had not previously been beaten in their attempts to connect me. After they had announced their arrival, I retreated indoors and let them get on with it, confident that they would soon be admitting defeat. About twenty minutes later they rang the doorbell, and, much to my surprise, told me that the cable was now in place.

Cable installed! Only took five years.

For some time, all was well. Broadband speeds were good, and to Virgin’s credit, the service was pretty reliable with very few outages, and I now had loads of new TV channels.

 

Over time however, dissatisfaction set in. Before 2017 I had not given much thought to streaming services or catch-up TV as the broadband speeds I was getting often made it a slow and frustrating experience, added to which was a lack of content that I was particularly interested in. As the years passed however, streaming services and catch-up TV increasingly became part of my TV viewing experience. For all Virgin's much vaunted number of channels,  there were very few that I was interested in that were not available through Freeview.

 

Companies like Virgin penalise customers whose loyalty you would think they would reward - the so called loyalty penalty - relying on customer inertia to accept annual prices rises. This often stems from a reluctance to switch suppliers, usually driven by the hassle that comes with such a change. I was as guilty of this as anyone, and by the middle of 2024 I realised that I was paying way too much money for a TV package that was effectively Freeview. In addition, I was paying subscriptions to Prime Video and Apple TV.

 

I therefore decided to dispense with my TV package and limit my subscription with Virgin to broadband (and the now nearly forgotten landline, as cutting it off wasn’t going to save me any money and we still received the odd call now and then on that number). But before I was able to do that, we had to deal with the Netflix Debacle.

 

We were not subscribed to Netflix but were interested in watching The Dropout, the drama series about Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, the company that claimed to have devised revolutionary blood testing equipment, which Netflix were showing. Our daughter offered us guest membership to her Netflix account so that we could watch the series, and for the first couple of episodes, this worked seamlessly. Then one fateful Saturday afternoon, when we tried to watch an episode, we somehow, accidentally, found ourselves subscribed to Netflix, and not for the basic package either, but for the Premium package at a princely £17.99 a month.

 

I immediately contact Virgin – via WhatsApp – and was assured that Netflix was cancelled and that I would not be billed. You won’t be surprised to learn that my next bill included a £17.99 charge for Netflix. I then embarked on a series of calls to Virgin – seven in all from August through to November – in which their inefficiency and ineffectiveness was astounding.

 

Just about the only thing that Virgin managed to get right was cancelling my TV contract and sending the packaging to return my TiVo box. Each and every month from August to November they refunded me for the previous month’s Netflix subscription but charged me again. I spoke to Zed, Aysha, Tista, Dave, Salma, Chris, Wilkie, and Beverley (not all of those spellings may be right) who all promised that Netflix would be cancelled but failed to deliver. I also spoke to Tyler, who told me that my subscription could only be cancelled by Netflix and that I should ring them. “I’m your customer, not Netflix’s, they won’t speak to me,” I told him and putting him on hold, I phoned Netflix. “You’re not our customer, we can't speak to you,” they told me, “only Virgin can cancel the subscription.”

 

At one point I received a call from a manager in customer services. He was not interested in my problem or in fixing it, but just wanted to understand why – when I’d been asked to provide feedback -  I had been less than complimentary about Virgin's customer service. He seemed to think that I should have known more about Virgin’s systems and procedures than the customer service representative I had spoken to. At one point he accused me of being unreasonable. “If you think I’m unreasonable, you should speak to my wife,” I said, handing the phone to Val.

 

Matters reached a head when we entered the latter stages of our house move. Virgin told me that to disconnect my services before the end of the billing cycle I would have to pay a disconnection fee, which I wasn’t prepared to do. So, they said that they would have to bill me the whole amount for one month, even though I’d only be connected for a few days, and that they would part refund me – by cheque! - within 42 days. I told them that that wasn’t going to happen and if they billed me the whole month, I would stop the Direct Debit and they could send me a bill, for which I would pay only what I deemed appropriate. As it transpired, they didn’t bill me and to their credit, they made me a payment for goodwill.

 

Like most organisations that rely on customer inertia, Virgin also seem to hope that when there are problems that they are unable or unwilling to fix - especially around billing - customers will give up complaining, write it off to experience, and accept the charges.

 

No doubt Virgin are no worse than other suppliers and I’m sure that customers of Sky, Talk Talk, EE, 3 and BT et al can all recount similar tales of woe. The measure of any organisation – whether it’s your broadband supplier, mobile phone company, energy provider, or bank – isn’t how they perform when things are going well, but how they react when problems arise, as I know full well from having worked in customer services in HSBC for many years. Virgin failed miserably in this respect; it should not take four months and seven phone calls totalling more than ten hours to fix a straightforward problem, but it did. The only good thing I can say about Virgin’s customer service is that I rarely had to wait more than a few minutes before being connected to someone whenever I phoned them; it all went downhill once I was connected though.

 

Having finally moved house –  a saga in itself which will be the subject of a blog in the near future – we now just have a broadband connection; no TV, no landline. I’ve had to phone our new ISP (Hyperoptic) twice since we were connected, both times about technical issues that they dealt with quickly and efficiently. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that that continues.