Closing a circle

Clearing and sorting part 3 - an end of year round up, of sorts.

A year ago today I wrote my first Substack post. I’d been a reader here for a couple of months but not considered writing until I discovered Beth Kempton and joined her Winter writing Sanctuary. I wasn’t expecting anyone to read my words, in fact, I wasn’t at all sure I wanted anyone to read what I wrote! However, here we are, a year later and there are 99 subscribers and over 450 followers…no one is more surprised about that than I am!

Over the last year I’ve written several posts about clearing, sorting and generally getting rid of “stuff” like this one in January

In October I wrote about sorting a lifetime of teaching resources.

Last week I finished the final task of this year’s clearing out. After 30 years of teaching I had amassed a huge number of resources which have proved difficult to dispose of without simply dumping them. There was everything from picture books to GCSE text books and more games, dice, counters etc, than you could possibly imagine, all looking for a new home.

The sorting was the easy bit, bin bags for the rubbish, storage boxes for the “keep” pile and cardboard boxes for the things to be recycled/given away. The rubbish went into the bin, the storage boxes went into the cupboard and I was left with a pile of boxes full of books and useful resources to give away.

I sent a shoebox full of pens, pencils and crayons to a charity called “Pens for Kids” then I emailed the local primary school, the second-hand bookshop and the local home-schooling group but no one wanted to even see what there was. I was very discouraged. However, I couldn’t bring myself to dump hundreds of pounds worth of books and games so I shoved them back into the cupboard and filed the problem under “for another day.”

Over 30 years ago our church was supporting a school in a slum area of Nairobi…we would sent stationery items out there every year until it became prohibitively expensive to send things. One December I was able to visit the school and I still receive an annual newsletter from the charity which runs it.

In this year’s newsletter they mentioned that they had benefited from a charity called Just Be A Child who had built a library in a shipping container and stocked it with useful books and resources. I spotted an opportunity and tentatively emailed JBAC to ask whether they might be interested in my boxes of books of “stuff.” Joyously, the answer was an immediate and emphatic “Yes please.” All I had to do was to deliver it, a 4 hour round trip on the M25 ensued and my 5 large boxes are now in a shipping container waiting to be sent to Kenya.

I had been so frustrated that no one wanted all the useful stuff I had acquired but now I know it will end up being far more useful in Kenya than it would have been here. I don’t know exactly where my things will go but there’s a pleasing circularity in knowing that, in 2025, some of my resources may end up in the school I visited in 1997.

It is a very satisfying way to draw a close to both the year and my teaching career. The empty space in my cupboards and shelves will no doubt be filled in due course, I’m very much not a minimalist when it comes to belongings, and the clearing and sorting of stuff is an on-going task.

However temporary the space may be, it’s given me head-space to think about what might come next and how I want to use the time and space I now have. To start with Beth’s Winter Writing Sanctuary begins in a couple of days so I guess there will be some wintery writing being done over the next week.

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