DEMENTIA CARE: THE YEAR OF CLEARING OUT RUBBISH.

That’s been the theme so far. Piling things up and chucking things out. More items must go. The last major alteration to the main room, the caring room, was the introduction of the hoist in the ceiling. This is a lie. After that came in, the whole room had to move around a bit. All over again.
   With the clunky hoist no longer lurking on the floor, there was space on the carpet. All of this is future space. Trying to get back to the idea that there’ll be room for the tree in December. Christmas in May. Sorted. Preparations happen earlier every year.
   It would be easier just to keep the tree up, but light it only when the frost comes a-calling. Shuffling things around, I found that emptying a storage chest offered a new opportunity. The opportunity to throw the storage chest out.
   With the chest empty and the contents spread around other storage areas, clearly I didn’t need that chest any longer. I could arrange even more space on the floor. Handy, as the new wheelchair won’t fit in the cupboard – where the old one is. The old one squeezes into that cupboard, wheezing, huffing, puffing…but making it, just the same.
   Time to go in for not quite throwing something out. The storage chest, useful at one time, now competes with the new wheelchair for space – and I need to get around there to switch the TV on. Also, in an emergency, I need to get around there to cut power to various devices in the event of an electrical fire – if I have time. But only if I have time.
   The storage chest will go to the furniture recycling charity shortly. Not quite throwing something out. Giving it away. The chest is now out in the front hall, where it can do little harm. One way of throwing things out. Another way of throwing things out is…by recycling the cardboard that comes in.
   Cardboard arrives in waves. Endless waves. Caring equipment is the worst for this. A large flat-packed chunk of equipment boils down to a compact item when assembled. But it’s out with the knife for the relentless sea of cardboard that the item arrived in.
   Items to charity. Recyclable objects to the right bins. And then organising the things that simply just have to go. This is tricky. I don’t want to bomb the pavement on bin day. And I do want to get rid of stuff that’s free to ditch. This means dismantling things that should be paid for if dumped intact, and then binning them.
   Will the bin clog up? Bin Police are on the prowl as I type. They haven’t complained yet. I don’t put super-large items in there. That’s the province of the uplift.
   The thing about paying for uplift is that you drop a flat fee for up to a certain number of items. So you need to save up those awkward bulky items, just to get the most value out of the cost. If you pay a million to send off up to a million items, you aren’t going to shell out for just one thing. You’ll wait until you have a million items.
   Exaggeration. But that’s where things are headed. To get there, I’d have to take items and assemble them so they could be collected for disposal. Large disposable items must be secure if they are to leave on the back of the big van.
   I dismantled two units and two desks and put them in the loft, on the basis that maybe there’d be room for them again one day. But the units weren’t great to start with. So I’ll need to haul them down and hope all the screws were left next to the main pieces. Or improvise screws that will hold long enough to reach the dump.
   Yes, I keep coming back to these dismantled furniture items every now and again. I think there were three desks and two units up there at the height of the madness. Maybe there’s a forgotten desk, lurking in bits, somewhere in the loft.
   No, I don’t rebuild them. Something usually gets in the way. Other projects take up floorspace. The new improved kitchen is a wonder to behold. But you should have seen the front hall with the fridge in it, while that kitchen was built. Outrageous. The thing I recycle most of all is the space in the front hall.
   And so it goes. Every few weeks, something else. True, I’ve been meaning to reassemble the units for years. With one eye on finding a space for them. This is never going to happen, with the way the house is arranged now. This year, they go.
   Two of those monstrosities, plus a defunct exercise machine, and a few other items, will add up to the best value for dropping money on a problem to make it all go away. But I have to assemble things before I assemble the list of things. Everything done in the right order.
   What is that proper order?
   Obsolete mobility equipment has to head back to the guy from stores. Frees up space in the kitchen. Then the furniture goes out to the charity shop. After that, I’ll have room for unit assembly indoors on a rainy day. But there’s room for assembly in the garden on a rare sunny day.
   Nothing happens until I go to the dentist for a check-up. If there’s a follow-up, I head to the dentist again. Don’t want anyone from stores or charity shops dropping in on me while I am away at the dentist. So the proper order is to see the dentist, take care of stores, send furniture to charity, scramble around in the loft, build things to a level of safety that allows them to go…and send a list of those things to the local authority. Cough up the cash. Space cleared. Job done.
   After that, I’ll finally prepare the kitchen walls for painting. Then the new kitchen will be a bit fresher and newer, for a while. All of this must be done gradually. Safely. I remember being in the habit of dismantling a unit and keeping the assorted fixings in a bag next to the largest pile of wood in the loft…
   If I’ve misplaced the screws, nuts, bolts, and pins, I’ll have to buy in more just to be shot of a few dodgy units. Shaky cupboards can’t go out to the pick-up. I hope my timing isn’t off. During the height of Covid restrictions, you couldn’t dump large items at all. Not legally.
   Did that lead to a rise in illegal dumping? Yes. I recall going to arrange a few items of business in person. Things best arranged in person. And, walking through the weed-strewn landscape, with its mutated triffids the height of bus shelters, I saw the consequences of someone’s actions.
   Furniture, bruised and battered, left there by a path. Not by the road. A quick tip of the fly variety. Van pulls up next to a space. Out goes the sofa. Drive on. Nothing to see here.
   No. Nothing as sophisticated as that. Two people started out from a house, made it to the top of a low hill, surrounded by houses, and couldn’t carry on to the nearest road. So they left furniture right there, with zero fucks to give, and fucked off.
   Pay to have the job done, and avoid heavy fines. Also avoid the need for an accomplice and an increased risk of Covid. Anyway, these units have a bit of a shaky design to them and I suspect I’ll have to plan a bit of reinforcing when it comes to bolting them all back together for the big push-off.
   Timing has to be right. If restrictions become more restrictive, there’ll be no uplift service again. And no furniture recycling either. I can’t dismantle EVERYTHING and parcel it off to the bin in reasonable doses. Did enough of that during the initial lockdown, a million years ago.
   This is the year of throwing things out, even if takes all year in bits and pieces. Things break. I employ spares, throw out the broken equipment, and order more spares. Some weeks, incoming doesn’t reach anywhere near to outgoing. Then there’s the sudden arrival of the cardboard mountain, or the polystyreneberg. A berg of polystyrene you could describe as of titanic size.
   It’s the worst. Bulky when whole. Fiddly and very messy when broken up. Too light. Utterly unrecyclable. And, in the literal sense, pure rubbish. I have one berg remaining out of the many polystyrene floes that sailed in and out of the kitchen.
   And it is one polystyreneberg too much. In a better world, the berg would have melted away. I could nail it to the wall and call it art. But it is too three-dimensional. Yes, I even manage the space on the walls. Some pictures. Many storage units.
   This is also the year of moving pictures around on the walls and in the halls…