There is a time to keep and a time to throw away. This is the second one.

It's a really strange thing to do, empty out someone else's house. This is not my subtle way of announcing to the webbed wide world that I have embarked upon a new career of burglary. Unfortunately, this is a reflection on how we've been clearing out my dad's remote farmhouse after his death last month.

"Remote" is a term heavy with understatement. For twenty years, access to this farmhouse has been at risk of the roads simply closing up with undergrowth. They get narrower and narrower as your car groans up the mountain (yes, really, mountain) and you eventually pop out at the summit blinking in the open space and surrounded by sheep. Cunningly, the actual driveway to the farmhouse is one hurdle further on: find the right unmarked track, and follow it round a bend, past a copse, and steeply downhill to find a building tucked in a dip (and thus entirely invisible from the road). If it's raining, and in this particular location, it probably will be, then you have the added excitement of the loose rocks tumbling down the scree of the driveway. This will either happen before you get there, in which case the drive will be impassable. Or it might only happen while you're there, in which case your car at the bottom risks being dented, and the drive will be impassable.

Do not be fooled by the almost picturesque image here - this is the ONLY time I have ever seen this place in anything approaching sunshine. And the steepest part of the drive is just round that bend.

Despite four people and about a million pairs of rubber gloves whipping through the place like a tornado, it took us two very long days to clear a five roomed cottage. And we were not exactly being discerning. The largest two heaps were "burn it now" and "bury it later". There was a small incident when we failed to separate out some angina sprays from the bonfire pile. That nitroglycerin goes up with a bang, doesn't it? We like to think of it as our own jubilee beacon. Well done queenie.

I should have just worn the bin-bag, it would have been easier. And drier. We must have filled at least 50 and burnt the same amount again. It has prompted a pact between my sister and I, to do an annual "hoarding sanity check" for each other.

In case you think we're entirely heartless, we did find plenty of things that gave us a pause, and plenty that made us laugh. I think my favourite was this: to you, simply an abused can of WD40. To me, a reminder of the little citroen 2CV in which I learned to drive.

Practicing at home one day, I dutifully sprayed the WD40 on the right bit of the engine to encourage it to actually start, and was so excited at my success that I promptly forgot all about the can on the ground and ran over it. And here it is, 19 years later, preserved for ... well, who knows what reason? But at least we can say we probably know better than to throw it on the bonfire.