Recycling a life's possessions

Shirts time. My father accumulated more shirts than me, now they must be passed on. All spotlessly clean and ironed, thanks to his carers, I spent a couple hours folding them neatly and placing them into bags. Below: the first lot, delivered to the Children's Society charity shop on Pitshanger Lane. A second lot followed. Mostly Marks & Spencers, some finer brands like Van Heusen too.

My father's shirts were too large around the neck for me (16 inch/41cm); although he'd shrunk dramatically in later life, he insisted that 'his' neck size was as it always was. And many shirts have short sleeves (I shun short sleeves, wanting my arms protected from UV light and ticks), and few have breast pockets (which I find necessary for mobile phone, reading glasses and ballpoint pen).

Several suits went to charity too. The inside leg at 29" is way too short for either son or grandsons. But all clean and pressed and well-looked after. The only things that went into the rubbish bin (along with the recycling) were his gardening clothes.

A day spent sifting with Cousin Hoavis, looking through Dziadzio's belongings - dozens of pencil stubs (an inch and half, yellow, with an eraser at one end), old wristwatches, alarm clocks, torches, radios, the stuff that is all in your phone these days. Much got taken up to Derbyshire, but there's still so much to go through. Books mostly. And ornaments. African airport art, chipped porcelain, things. Things were once more valuable than they are today, commodities. People are less attached to things than they were. My mother considered herself a collector rather than a hoarder, and the result of that self-applied term is that the attic is full of very dusty boxes full of 'pieces' wrapped in old newspapers from the 1990s; what value they have now is questionable.

Up in the attic there were boxes of my stuff too - in particular analogue photography bits and bobs. Old cameras and lens, film processing and print-making equipment. All useless today. Totally superseded by digital photography. Almost any effect that you can get from a film camera can be replicated digitally. The value of these old cameras, once considered 'classics', is a fraction of what it once was. "The value of anything is only that which a given person is prepared to pay at a given time," the mantra of camera collectors in the 1980s. But Cousin Hoavis has a sneaking admiration for the time-consuming manual way of making images back them, so he has taken my photo stuff up north.

Photography should be about the end, not the means. The image, not the camera. Vast, then, was my joy at finding a 'lost' photo album of my parents from the early years of their marriage and indeed - prewar and wartime pictures of my father's family. Below: photo of my father, dated 11 April 1941, After the death of his father, my father along with his elder brother Ździch would earn money by playing at weddings and dances, busking in courtyards.

And here is the only known photo of my father's younger brother, Józio - the one who died during the Warsaw Uprising, at whose grave my father laid a single red flower each year.

Looking at Józio's face, I can see both Eddie and his Cousin Hoavis's feature. The photo is undated. Józio was 19 when he died, already promoted to senior sergeant (starszy sierżant). He fought in Batalion Miotła, in the bloodbath that was Wola, into the Old Town, escaping before it fell via the sewers to Czerniaków, and it was here he died in early September 1944, succumbing to wounds received five days earlier in heavy fighting.

There's so much still to go through, so many books. My greatest happiness at this sad time is that I get on so well with my brother; we have fought over nothing. "You want this? Have it. I want this - " "OK". May it ever be thus!

This time last year:
You can always go downtown

This time three years ago:
Opinions vs facts - our media today

This time four years ago:
Judging PO's eight years in power

This time five years ago
Cloudless, 18C - the beauty of Polish autumn

This time six years ago: 
Call 19115: Warsaw Fix-my-Street

This time eight years ago:
Vapour trails at sunset

This time nine years ago:
Autumnal blues