Fifty years of stuff

About this episode

The episode explores the thin line between nostalgia and junk as the hosts reflect on their family's sentimental belongings.

Something I couldn't bring myself to throw out five years ago is plainly junk now. The line separating nostalgia and rubbish is thin. Every few years we wade through a sedimentary layer of crap in the Fink family home. We don't often make much headway, because the room is full of mementoes that span lifetimes. The trinkets in here go all the way back to Mum's childhood. Mum's uncle Noel, who lived to 99 and ten months, had a framed letter from Winston Churchill. Amazing. Also useless. Col and I had different feelings about the family home after we moved out, but we've landed in a similar place. Neither of us are attached to much there now, but there are some things we couldn't bear the thought of purging. A keepsake here, a handcrafted relic there. The rest could go tomorrow and we'd never notice. The trouble is, the room doesn't know that. So it sits there, holding fifty years of stuff hostage on behalf of the handful of things that still matter. As he often does, David Whyte captures the feeling well: "Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past, nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end." See you again in a few years.

People in this episode

Hosts: Col, Cam

Topics covered

• nostalgia
• family
• mementoes
• purging
• sentimentality
• memory

Keywords

• nostalgia
• family home
• mementoes
• purging
• sentimentality
• memories
• keepsakes

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