Clinging On

I have just carried a huge wilting white poinsettia into my utility room to put it into the sink for a long deep drink. As I retraced my steps, collecting an abundance of fallen leaves, I thought I was probably too late. The remaining withered leaves are unlikely to cling to their stem for much longer.

    But the pseudo flowering plant, with its blossom of pale leaves, has out-classed itself as it filled a corner that in other years has boasted a large bouquet of winter blooms to last across the Christmas period and just about into the new year. The room will look bare a fortnight later than usual, longing for the first daffodils.

    Trying to decide whether it’s time to throw out the plant has made me think about other aspects of my life where I have hung on to things in the hope that they will revive or come in useful. Once- favourite clothes, reminiscent of weddings or outings, hang forgotten and at risk of moths. Over the years, the mending pile has collected many ancient items needing taking up, or letting out or even just a replacement matching button which was never sourced.

    Sadly, clinging on extends to my writing. I have baskets of drafts of published books - they could go of course - but maybe not the unused sections of the Creative Therapy books. My co-author and I wrote too many activities for one of the titles so kept our finely-honed illustrated work in case we ever wrote a sequel. We didn’t. Then there are those early clumsy short stories, and the poems (gosh, they were dreadful!) plus rough drafts and two whole novels for teens. Out of date, but never out of mind as I remember the characters and try to imagine where they would be now (if they were real, of course).

    And research - all my handwritten or typed notes for anything ever written. There are many, many more lumped together on my laptop, some in a folder named ‘Old Laptop’ and others in one named ‘Previous Laptop’. I have to open documents to discover the elder of these two folders whenever I have the thought ‘didn’t I write something similar once before?’

     Does anyone else have this reluctance to destroy any writing? Or does everyone have complete confidence that anything fresh from their pen will be better than their old scribbles? 

    Or, horror of horrors, am I a hoarder? No, surely not, I can still just about squeeze into my study!

    But didn’t I write something about a hoarder once? I’m sure I have it somewhere . . .

Annie Try is a retired Clinical Psychologist who has written books and articles (as Angela Hobday) on working therapeutically with children and adolescents. She now writes novels including the Dr Mike Lewis stories of a Clinical Psychologist with extraordinary clients who are adept at uncovering mysteries.