I'm clearing up the house to make it more appealing for a potential buyer and this means going through some of the piles of papers etc. that have accumulated.
I'm faced with a bit of a dilemma. I have copies of New Notes (spnm's monthly magazine) going back to June 1998 and I can't decide whether to get rid of them or not. I probably won't miss them when they're gone, but I feel a bit of a twit having carefully saved them all up for nearly ten years and then chucking them all. Ex-girlfriend always said a had a 'thing' about possessions and that I kept things that I should throw away. I'm really in two minds about this. I've been ruthless with a lot of old concert programmes and have only kept the ones that have pieces of mine in them (and the year's worth of concerts here where I edited the programmes).
Any thoughts?

Ooh. I just can't do it right now.
I'll just have to wait until I'm feeling fiercely decisive and then chuck them.

I remember once donating stuff to our college library (Was in charge of a society with a room rather over-filled with oldish maths books), thinking it probably the best place to donate stuff to, only to to some people complain about me behind my back; they were overfull apparently. People like that can just go feck themselves, is what I say.

chuck the new notes hh

I had about 6 or 7 years worth of new notes and they've all been recycled recently

But I have similar problems - I've recently stopped my subscription to Gramophone but I've got every copy since 1987 - it's going to be harder, psychologically, for me to recycle those. They are however of no use to me since I look on-line when I want to know about a recording.

My loft is full of old copies of magazines which I've clung on to - they should all go really. Ignore the advice about keeping interesting articles - that just makes the job 10x harder since you'll have to read through every copy and make decisions about each article 

A good friend of mine who, unfortunately, I haven't seen for some years had a wonderful approach to possessing things - as he did to a lot of other things as well. I borrowed Zola's Germinal from him and, when I'd finished it, I went to return it to him. He told me to give it to someone who hadn't read it as he didn't keep books. A lesson to all hoarders/collectors - which I am too, of course, as you'll have gathered!

Of course the same thing could be said about CDs as about books. I did stop collecting CDs in about 1995, although I do purchase some from time to time. However I'm an inveterate collector of recordings which I've made myself and I find this very difficult to control. I'm currently recycling lots of my older minidiscs since I'm over the 1000 mark and can't keep buying more and more. However it was wonderful the other day to look out an old reel-to-reel tape of Don Giovanni (see http://r3ok.myforum365.com/index.php?topic=1646.msg54390#msg54390) - this is why we hoard of course, just in case 

There's always ebay but the problem with that is parcelling the stuff up ( 260 copies of Gramophone ! ) Although you can specify local pick up only I believe.

There's been a fair amount of chuckling too, stuart! Old photos are often quite chuckleworthy. Oh, and lots of mirth reading a postcard I wrote to my grandparents when I was 8, which included the news that my little brother was bribed a shilling to pee for the first time standing up! I remember feeling very cross that this was unfair to my sister and me!

Yes, don't chuck them, hh. I'd be more than happy to take them off your hands (I didn't subscribe to new notes myself till relatively recently), as would at least one or two others round here by the sound of things.

I can identify with Andy's comment about not trying to keep 'just the interesting ones' because you'll then end up putting it off till you have time to re-read and make a decision about every article. That's exactly what happens to me with the magazine Music Sales send out every couple of months. I should just make the decision to keep them all - it would be much easier, and as Ian and Biroc say they might be useful references in 20 years to show what seemed important at the time.

Re hoarding generally, I'm ruthless about throwing away almost anything except what I think of as potentially work-related (i.e. stuff I might want to refer back to ... and that 'might' makes it a very broad category!). But the concert programmes, film/book reviews etc. all get thrown into a cupboard and it's only recently occurred to me that it might be useful to subdivide that cupboard into folders by subject/date etc. - largely because I've been very impressed on a couple of recent occasions by autoharp's ability rapidly to produce information relating to 60s/70s concerts and periodicals.