Storage

Punch and Judy with their baby

In the past few years, I have frequently received warnings about my Hotmail e-mail account. I have been told that my storage capacity is almost full and on several occasions I have deleted all my "junk" messages and "deleted items" as well as selected e-mails received in previous months and years.

However, what I had neglected to do was to properly  investigate my "Sent Items" and do some brutal felling in that particular forest.

I have had a Hotmail account since 2007 and today  I discovered I had over a thousand "Sent Items" in accessible storage  - some of them with images or documents attached. By getting rid of the majority of these I will be bound  to free up storage capacity but that is more easily said than done.

Those e-mails go back nineteen years and document moments in my personal history. It is not going to be as easy to delete them as I first imagined.

There are e-mails about our Frances starting university, around the deaths of Shirley's mother, my mother, my two late brothers. E-mails sent from India, Thailand and Easter Island, e-mails that speak of my increasing disgruntlement with teaching before I retired. E-mails about house buying and selling and so on and so forth.

No. It won't be easy at all. I guess I will just tackle it in stages. Of course I do not wish to get rid of significant messages or those that have become like historical records. Earlier today I sent one back to Frances who is currently on a work-related training conference in Copenhagen. Soon afterwards, she got back to me...

"Thanks for this. Brings back lots of memories. So long ago now!" 

To me 2007 does not really seem "so long ago now" but when I stop and think, I was just a young lad of 53 back then.  In many ways the world was a different place. Apple i-phones had only just come on the market and very few people had them until 2010. It was the year in which Britain's Labour PM Tony Blair was replaced by Gordon Brown and the best selling album in Great Britain was Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black".  Manchester United won The Premier League and over in America mentally ill Seung-Hui Cho shot 32 people dead at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. 

I guess that I am more drawn to hoarding than to minimalism and in that sense I already find the prospect of wading through all those "Sent Items" with an axe quite daunting but as I said before, I do not need to do the culling in one go. Step by step. "That's the way to do it!" as Punch said to Judy.