It's just stuff.

In October last year it was a bit of a struggle to pack up my things to move flat. I was a moody drunk, and I didn't care enough not to just throw things haphazardly into boxes. I threw a lot of practical stuff away, because I couldn't be bothered to own it or move it. I kept all the sentimental stuff though - poems, diaries, drawings, old newspapers with historical headlines. It all went under my bed in my new place where it's been for the last 10 months, untouched.

Now I'm getting ready to move again, only this time I'm well excited about it. I pulled the now dusty boxes out from under the bed tonight and looked through the stuff I had deemed worthy of hanging on to. Then I binned the lot.

It's a new start. It feels right not to drag the past around with me any more. I never look at that stuff and actually I cringed big-time just now when I saw it. Some recycling collector might get a laugh out of my 1998 diary I suppose, and the book I started to write when I was 22 in which I'd said everything I'd wanted to say by the end of chapter 3 but still printed it out from my antique Atari computer with the green screen. I remember the bits I want to remember and filter out the rest; or at least I have friends to fill in the blanks.

Except I couldn't bring myself to throw one particularly amusing 'poem' away, which I wrote in my early twenties about leaving yet another flat in Brixton whose bathroom was infested with cockroaches. It was a two bedroom place I shared with a friend for six months when neither of us had any other friends, but by the time we left it (to move to the slightly more picturesque Finsbury Park), the place had become the hub of the after-hours Brixton club scene.

Goodbye Roach Flat

by Emma Hall (a long long time ago)

Goodbye roach flat.

I shall never forget

all that became

inside your walls, sliding on your

burst-pipe water

smelling your blocked-drain fumes

Goodbye roach flat.

We came, us two, unbeknown

that we would leave as six, seven, eight.

It was worth the wait.

Will our kitchen look so stylish

in a new place as it does, in such a mess, in you?

Good bye roach flat.

For all the creatures we disposed of

in your bathroom

none of it matters

next to the friendships

that blossomed inside of you.

Roach flat, your rooms echoing the sounds

of stomping dog upstairs.

It was all worth it.

You gave us territory, sanctuary,

to find our remaining brain cells,

and our best times, ever.

Dear oh dear - I was never a poet, and I do know it.