Must get this place cleared up

I've always had a bit of a "thing" about keeping things.

Not in a weird Secret Hoarder way or anything, I'm not that mad.  But I do hang onto things "just in case" they might once again become useful.  It's not unusual, loads of folk are like this.  And sometimes it's justified, especially with old PCs, because of their largely modular architecture.  In fact, the machine I'm typing this on has definitely got some bits of the old ones in it somewhere - memory modules I think - but in the main it's just clutter.

There must be at least five old TVs up in the top room (most of this stuff hangs out up there), at least as many old monitors (I mean, why the fuck have I still got two - not one, but two - massive old CRT monitors with tiny 14 inch screens?), god knows how many empty boxes and boxes inside boxes (which may contain further stuff).  Then there's all the boxes of audio and video tapes, pieces of old furniture, appliances (lamps, kettles, toasters etc.) that don't work any more and so on.

Obviously the easiest thing to do would be to just get someone to clear it out and take it all away. But there's stuff there that I really do want to hold onto mixed up in it all somewhere.  I mean, I've got a collection of NMEs going back almost continually to about 1990, which apart from being historically fascinating to a nerd like me, would be worth a few hundred quid to someone, going by the prices on Ebay (and far more if sold piecemeal).  I'd be a fool to chuck them out, wouldn't I?  And I'd never chuck my original 48K Spectrum (which still works, 32 years on) or C64. Or the Amiga. Or the Speak & Spell machine etc. etc.

Ah, I'll get to it eventually.  It's a work in progress, let's say.

This behaviour extends as far as data, of course; even when I was programming stuff on the Spectrum and everything had to be stored on audio tape (I can't recall if solid-state storage was available for the Speccy in 1986, but if it was it would've been far too expensive for me), I very rarely taped over anything, because I thought I might need the old versions as backups (come to think of it, this is now regarded as best practise, so well done me).

But now (2015 I think it is) data storage is - if you make best use of cloud storage - effectively free. Even if you want an actual physical storage device, 3 terabyte hard drives only cost about fifty quid these days and as for 500Gb drives, I think they come free in cereal packets these days. That's my justification for keeping absolutely everything, anyway.  Including all my old emails, both sent and received, since 1997. That is a bit odd, isn't it? I don't know anyone else who does that.  But hell, they take up almost no physical space, so why not?  Why, it would be a fool not to follow my lead.