Why that box of old cables you're keeping can go in the bin
After clinging on to multiple boxes and bags of cables, adapters and historic electronics, I've realised that there are more useful things to be preserving for future scenarios—and they don't have any wires.
Every man has a drawer or box full of old cables and electronics, right? I hate to stereotype, but I'm also reasonably confident that every man reading this (and let's be fair, quite a few women too) will have a tangled mess of old USB charging cables, adapters, probably an ancient phone or two, and old batteries, if you have kids.
I've moved house so many times now (ten times since leaving home in 2005) that I've accumulated several of these boxes of treasures, accumulating more of them as my technology became obsolete. In a musty-smelling cardboard box somewhere lies my old iPod, purchased in 2006 using my student loan (don't read this part, mum) and still festering because I couldn't bring myself to throw it away.
There are dozens of weird adapters for every conceivable need: not just your various flavours of USB (come on, this is entry-level stuff), but all kinds of arcane audio/video converters, upscalers and extenders. There are gadgets I briefly thought I needed (an HDMI splitter, a universal remote control, a soundbar) and all kinds of orphaned power supplies, their parent device now long-gone.
Why do we do this? What scenario are we planning for where there's suddenly a desperate need for a 3.5mm audio jack adapter so someone can plug their bluetooth speaker into a toaster?
You ain't gonna need it
The couple of times this has happened to me—eg. I realised I had a combination of devices I couldn't directly connect—I was unable to find the adapter I knew was sitting in a box somewhere. Wrestling with sewing machine power supplies, a wah-wah pedal for my guitar, a plastic canister of camera film from an unknown shoot and random USB cables, I frantically dug around for the little gold-plated plug I knew was just in the bottom of this box.
Of course, I couldn't find it. Buying a new one from Amazon felt like a huge failure: why had I bothered keeping all of this junk, if not for this imagined-yet-real future moment? Maybe I didn't need any of it.
But what about the memories?
One thing I have clung onto, though, is old drawings and writing from my childhood. My mum kept this stuff in boxes in her house for years until I had enough space of my own to take ownership of it. I went through a vast trove of school exercise books, essays, art projects and books and managed to whittle it down to a few choice things, including this mask I made of my dad's face 30 years or more ago:
I sat down with my son, who's just starting to learn to write himself, and read him some of the "stories" I'd written down at a similar age. The accompanying illustrations were right up his street:
Okay, I'll admit it: the four-year-old lost interest in my childhood artistry after about 90 seconds. But for a brief moment, I was able to connect him with the boy that I was, and perhaps make him realise in a more tangible sense that I used to be a child just like him, back in the mists of time. As he held in his hand my drawings and stories, he might just have been able to conceive of his dad as a precocious little boy like him, and felt a little bit closer as a result.
So perhaps the box of cables and redundant electronics can go in the bin (with a sad look of longing as it disappears into the trash, imagining all the things you might need them for). But the stuff worth clinging on to are the real "adapters" (sorry) – the ones that might help you translate a feeling, an experience or a person, across time and space, and make a working connection.
Mini feelings this week
Christmas, eh?
Every year we try to balance the needs of our various families, dependents (kids, parents...) and friends against our fervent desire to have a simple, easy Christmas. We've tried bringing the family to us, staying with them, going solo and travelling everywhere in a week. This year we stayed home, just the four of us, and bought pre-prepared food to make the Christmas dinner easier to assemble. It was still stressful, exhausting and lawless... but fun, in places. All I can conclude from this is that Christmas is basically controlled chaos, and you've got to just roll with it. See you in 2024!