Swedish Death Cleaning

Ailz introduced me to Swedish Death Cleaning. It's like last year's Marie Kondo thing but with overtones of The Seventh Seal. Pretty cool, eh? What you do is pretend you're already dead and you're one of your own heirs and you're looking over your forlorn possessions and thinking, "Why on earth did Grandpa hang onto that?"

I'm trying. It's hard.

I've continued to sort through photographs and other papers- and the piles of things to be chucked out or moved elsewhere continue to grow but in the end there's a certain randomness to the process. Also, after a while, I find myself suffering from dispassion fatigue.

Diaries

And then there are the diaries I kept through the 90s.

I picked one up and read a few entries. At the time of writing I thought my future self would read them with fascination. I was wrong.

A while back I said some disobliging things about my mother's wartime diaries. My diaries are much the same- only very much wordier.

I dropped the diaries round about the time I started to blog. With a blog you are writing for a readership- which may be hypothetical- but at least you feel under an obligation to entertain. With a diary this isn't the case.

Shall I read them (can I bear to read them) and see if there's anything in them worth keeping- or shall I just put them straight on the fire?