Time travelling junk

The funny thing about time travel is that we all do it all of the time. Or until we're dead at any rate. It's the ultimate eco-friendly mode of transport: no machinery required (just one more-or-less functioning mind each); only a modest daily calorific allowance needed (wholly from renewable sources of energy); and all contained within a human-shaped capsule (with self-healing properties and infinite variation). Yep, pretty much perfect.

Except our uniquely designed personal time machines each have one big Achilles heel; we can only travel forwards. Assuming that we're not all about to be issued with a manufacturer's recall notice from the great garage in the, um, wherever, we learn to live with this fault. By age six, say, we start to accept that we have an annual ration of one birthday. At age seventeen, we cringingly appreciate that we cannot take back that declaration of enduring love made by text message. We know it's a waste of our thirties to wish we had done things differently. No, by means of whatever particular lessons it takes - whether through osmosis or simply by observation - we find ourselves knowing that our own personal time machine does not come with reverse fitted as standard.

Or at least most of us do. For within every generalisation lies an exception. My mum is one such.

Thirty years ago mum bought a house. The house has seen its share of comings and goings and undergone its own gradual shifts of layout, decor and furnishings in the three decades that have passed since. The one and only constant during that time - the datum point if you like for the scientifically-minded - is my mum. Or more accurately, my mum and her ever expanding strata of junk.

Now yes, I'm well aware that junk is often perceived as a pejorative term; and yes, that one (wo)man's trash is another (wo)man's treasure. Walk into my mum's house on any day at any time in any year and every surface in your eye line (as well as those below it) will be piled high with interesting things. In her accumulation of stuff, my mum is ruthlessly Marxist - everything truly is equal in her eyes. Thus broken lampshades, threadbare school uniforms and mouse-eaten Easter bonnets are treated just the same as her wedding dress, my late father's stamp collection or the small pile of rare first editions. Family photographs jostle for space with the Radio Times from last Christmas; her newly-bought clothes with those that fitted the infant me at the tail end of the 60s; handmade English slipware china made just for her by a potter friend with plastic union jack flags and bunting from the Queen's Golden Jubilee.

The trouble is, I think, is that to my mum it is not junk around her but a means of re-living the past and of breathing life into her memories. She does not see the same old heap of tat that I do when I walk into her bedroom; she sees the faces of my little sister and I as children; she smells the smells of her own mother cooking; she hears the laugh of her late husband. Thinking about it, it's maybe not so much that the things around her enable her to put her personal time machine into reverse as such (although I think she'd like them to); it's perhaps more that the objects enable the past to come with her into the present.

Mum is, needless to say, also exceptionally reluctant to throw anything away. It is as if the items contain a little of the essence of the person that owned them, rather like people were once afraid of having their photograph taken because they thought it would steal their soul away. Over the years, I've got used to how mum is. I appreciate too to a large extent it is also none of my business if she chooses to fill her house with all manner of ephemera, even if that means that no living soul has actually sighted her bed in the last six years. Except of course when she needs some help shifting it, as she did today in anticipation of the men coming to fit her new central heating tomorrow

I have to be honest and say that I was not looking forward to it. I knew the day would consist, in large part, of me saying "let's chuck this old thing out" and her being all wild eyed and defensive and snatching the item from my hands as if I was suggesting throwing a real baby out of the window. Repeat ad nauseam until both of us were sweaty and hot and irritated and bad tempered with each other.

However today, for the first time in a long time, I detected a different force at work. Yes, she put up a token gesture of reluctance when it came to me throwing into the recycling three large boxes of my old school exercise books, for example. But a token gesture is what I mean, not the anger that has been present on similar occasions before. So as a result of which, with valiant help in emptying the attic from my brother-in-law, we got enough cleared for the plumbers to get access where they need it in about half the time I had anticipated. I was even able to take a whole car load down to the municipal dump, an unprecedented move.

Afterwards, when we were at my sister's house waiting for dinner, I thought it was right to say to mum how impressed I was with how relatively easily she'd been able to 'let things go', that it made me think that she must have been actively disengaging from some of the stuff in advance. I think she was pleased that I'd noticed but didn't really say much by way of response. But it did make me wonder if it really has taken until now for her to accept that her personal time machine does not have a reverse gear. I guess only time will tell.