Am in Bildeston, Suffolk once more. Just me and Dad. Mum’s in Cornwall. This time it’s a practical reason; my Highgate place is being redecorated, re-plastered and generally upgraded. It makes more sense for me to move out for a week than try to sleep amongst it all. So here I am.

Just completed an hour-long interview on the phone with a Swedish daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter. I’m being flown to Stockholm on Oct 19th for about 24 hours, during which I shall sing with the band Friday Bridge, DJ briefly at a club, and give interviews about the new Fosca album.

Nice to be able to get on with the present after two weeks of dithering and mithering over my past. There’s still about 15 boxes left to clear, but I’ve gotten rid of about 1000 books, 500 CDs, 20 DVDs, all my videos, my TV, VCR, Freeview box, turntable, stereo, speakers, and my noisy old desktop PC. And after that, I’ve cleared about five boxes stuffed with paperwork.

Have tidied up my vanity products by buying stackable vanity boxes from Muji. Because I’m very vain about vanity boxes.

After mentioning that I was chucking out photos I’d taken from the Orlando v Kenickie tours of 1996 & 1997, I get emails from Emma Kenickie and Tim Orlando asking that they’d like to have such doomed snaps if they’re going, or at least see them before oblivion beckons.

My first thoughts are, well, it’s not as if Kenickie and Orlando were rarely photographed at the time. But of course, it’s the fact they were taken by me on my own camera that piques interest. And once it’s mentioned but not shown, I’m like one of those irritating ‘Wicked Whispers’ gossip columnists, all tease and no delivery. ‘Which Peter Pan of Pop was seen kissing a mystery elf in Hornsey Londis at elevenses? Shhh!’

These days, everyone has a camera or camera-phone, or expects there to be one close at hand. Perhaps this new lust for photo-recording everything engenders a yearning to back-date. Tim says he didn’t take photos himself on those tours, but if it were now, such a tour would be photo-documented within an inch of its life. And I wonder if Emma was camera-less too, that packing a camera was in fact an unusual idea back then, at least for bands that were already regularly photographed by the media. Maybe I was being weird as usual, what with my camera and my text message device (pager) and my email address in 1996. Right things, wrong time.

To my mind, the photos I’ve jettisoned were blurry and red-eyed and dull and unflattering to those depicted. Contrary to what Bucks Fizz sang (or was it Stephen Poliakoff?) the camera often lies.

But of course you just can’t win, and I ponder being in fearful conversations like these:

‘I found an old photo of you from 1896. It’s not great, but don’t worry, I’ve thrown it out rather than embarrass you or imply that it’s all been downhill since then.’
‘You weird fool! I’d love to have seen it. I’ll be the judge of whether it’s embarrassing or rubbish, thank you very much. Some friend you are.’
‘Hmph. Look, okay. Here’s one of you I didn’t throw out, which I really like.’
‘Oh, I’ve already seen that one. It’s rubbish.’

Versus this:

‘I found an old photo of you. Here you go.’
‘You weird fool! What are doing keeping rubbish photos of me for so long? And so badly taken! You’ve just reminded me that I was having a terrible hair day that… year. Thanks a lot. Some friend you are.’

It’s my fault, I know. Mention photos at all, and people want to see them. My boxes become Pandora’s. I think the best approach is just to keep quiet about the photos you do have to throw out – for whatever reason- but keep the rare ones you like, and share the ones you keep. So I’ll do that from now on. And sorry, Tim and Emma.

When it’s 3am and you’re on your hands and knees going through endless piles of old things, feeling uncertain about which ones you need to keep, and becoming increasingly tempted to just throw everything out rather than go insane, there’s inevitably a few casualties in the Out pile. And some I’m already regretting myself.

One person’s nostalgia is another’s clawing open of old wounds.

Now, okay, the above sentence doesn’t apply to those Kenickie tours, which were on the whole a pretty happy time for me. And indeed, happily pretty. Certainly it was an absolute privilege to tour with Kenickie, and to do so twice. But there’s times when the phrase does apply to some sections of my past, and it can be hard not to let the painful bits upstage the fun bits. Thus comes the appeal of trashing everything from the same period regardless, like the culling of uncontaminated animals during epidemics.

And as I sit there, thinking of all these things, sighing over the endless sifting, I notice that I’m late for the Neil Gaiman talk in Piccadilly. As I run for the tube, I am absolutely seething with anger that all this dithering, all this endless poring over items from the past has made me late for something I really do want to do TODAY. And the thought of just binning everything I haven’t touched for years and getting on with the rest of my life appeals greater than ever. What use is a past if it’s literally stopping me living in the present?

Besides, there were other people at those gigs with cameras, I tell myself. Or, they write and tell me:

your latest entry gave me goosebumps, partly cos of the idea of the old pics you were looking at – i was doing the very same at the end of last week! (and of the same Kenickie tour too). So if you fancy a gander at old pics on t’web rather than cluttering up physical space, you and Tim might (i said ‘might’!) enjoy reading this post…