Into the Bin

I have passed through so many sorts of life:village child commuting to Newcastle to go to school* up to the age of 17; budding art student on Foundation at Sunderland Polytechnic; disappointed Undergraduate (well, they were all dating African princes and getting diamond necklaces for their 21st birthdays) at Brighton Art College before becoming a punk rocker and learning to play bass. Then I was a post-punk band member, in the Chefs and then Helen and the Horns. Then a music worker on estates in Sarf London, before getting married and having two daughters. We were perilously poor with nothing in the fridge and nothing in the bank, but a roof over our heads. So I went back to college and ended up a University Lecturer, and now I'm a musician again as well.
Zig
Zag
Zig
Zag
And now, after divorcing nearly two years ago, me and the Offsprogs are packing up our big airy Edwardian house and if we are lucky, moving into a railwayman's cottage, two up, two down, and all the rubbish in our loft must Go.
A lot of it doesn't seem like rubbish. The sociology notes from Sunderland Polytechnic (we had to do it as part of our general studies): the Declaration of Human Rights, the Declaration of Independence, lilac-coloured roneo'd notes on art and ethics: they brought back the memory of the sociology lecturer, bearded and with John Lennon glasses and a tweed jacket, too young to look so old and with an earnest whiff of the sixties about him.
Notes from working on the estates in Southwark- from a children's song sharing day where youth workers of all ages, genders and backgrounds sang songs to each other. And I remembered taking a little drum machine into a youth group and getting the kids to rap something about themselves over the beat. 'My daddy died yesterday', sang one little girl. Nobody had known. We stopped for a chat after that.
Notes from when I first started work as a lecturer, hating to leave my kids. Every morning they climbed into my bed for a cuddle, and with my eyes closed as I held them I thought: relaxed child=Offsprog One, tense child=Offsprog Two;
And every morning my then husband brought me a cup of tea, and every morning the tabby cat from Battersea head-butted my hand just as I was lifting the cup to take the first sip, and it spilt on her head. Every morning!
In the bin, in the bin, to be recycled and made into pulp....
Notes from Song Club, that I ran with Dan. I'm keeping a lot of the kids' pictures, but dumping a lot of the rest. We went to London Zoo and wrote songs about cleaning out the cages and what animal we would be. I would be a giraffe (someone else chose zebra, so giraffe was second best). We sang the songs at the zoo, with orange buckets from B & Q and brooms from Robert Dyas, making rhythms that the guy from Stomp showed us. It was a freeezing day in November but the kids LOVED it.
In the bin, in the bin, all the big sheets of paper we wrote the lyrics on together. Those kids are at secondary school now!
I felt very sad. But I do know, this part of the moving on process is the hard part, as you feel yourself winding down and closing doors before the next lot are fully open.

*the poet Basil Bunting lived in Wylam and used to get the same train sometimes. He had a big cartoon moustache and a leather briefcase with 'B Bunting' stencilled in white on the sides. Was he vain, or was he worried about getting his briefcase mixed up with someone else's, I used to wonder?