or, Gwyn Donates A Computer To A Museum.

Since Yvonne’s mother Betty moved house in December and died in January, I have been introduced to the benefits of Decluttering. I am not in any sense a hoarder; I just don’t throw things away.

Betty was ruthless. Anything that seemed ‘old’ or ‘worn’ was unceremoniously dumped. There was no room for sentiment.

She was horrified at the things I kept. When we moved into Mount View Road 30 years ago, I brought with me a Redactron, the first computer I ever bought. I last switched it off in 1984, at which time it was in perfect working order. We needed three men to manoeuvre it into the basement, where it has been sitting unused and undisturbed these past three decades.

I used to own a book and theatre publicity company called Headley Plachta Rolfe. I bought the Redactron second-hand in 1979 from the Prudential Insurance Company for £5,000, 7% of the purchase price of our house; the equivalent today of about £100,000 — as a percentage of the house price, of course, to show how artificial the housing market has become.

Book publicity in those days consisted of phone calls, mailings, letters, drinks and lunches. Mainly drinks and lunches. We kept our own jealously guarded records of journalist contact details. List brokers barely existed and their data was laughably inaccurate. The Redactron helped us store all the data we needed on our journalists, which was basically one address, one phone number. These were the days before even faxes.

We would write standardised boilerplate letters, flavoured with a few personal touches to make them seem individual. As we already knew almost all the journalists by meeting with them and speaking to them on the phone, the Redactron helped us add simple personal touches. Fancy a drink, George?

The cable connecting the CPU box to the printer was thicker than my forearm. The printer was an IBM golfball, and as I was originally a typographer I acquired all the different font balls, although only one has survived.

We were based in Fitzroy Square at the time, in a Grade I listed building. When we turned the Redactron on, lights would be dimmed across Fitzrovia. When we ran it, conversation ceased and flakes of plaster would drift down from the ceiling. The room thrummed. We purchased earplugs in bulk.

Recipients got what was to all intents and purposes a hand-typed personal letter. It was an age when it would have been rude not to respond. We were sending out 300 of these a day with the aid of the Redactron. Our competitors could barely manage thirty.

We did very well for a while. Certainly well enough to recoup the money shelled out for the Redactron several times over.

And now it’s time to say goodbye to my old friend. Some years ago I wrote this blog about the Redactron, after I discovered the machine had been invented by a remarkable women named Evelyn Berezin. And a few years later Evelyn Berezin herself spotted the blog. Still later she suggested that as apparently it is the last Redactron in existence, I might like to donate it to the American Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.  “As long as they come and pick it up,” I insisted. I’m not risking my sacroiliac again.

Having just read A Feathered River Across The Sky, the tragic tale of how Americans extinguished the Passenger Pigeon, I thought I’d give them something of their own to preserve.

Our original intention was to turn the basement into a kitchen, but the Redactron took up too much space. Perhaps at last we can go ahead.

Here it is, dusty as nature intended, at the start of its journey from Mount View to Mountain View. Good luck, old pal!

Gwyn with his Redactron

The museum specified that we must not clean it up before despatching it, it’s not that we’re sluttish or anything.

As well as decluttering, we are Defiling as well. You may think you knew what ‘defile’ meant. With ten filing cabinets to clear out, we’re busy creating a new meaning for the word.

We’re in a bit of a state in our London office. We are being repainted outside, and at the same time we are having a large new office window installed. We chose the manufacturer from an ad in the Sunday Times, and work was due to start on Tuesday 22^nd April. Today is May 2nd and they haven’t turned up yet. Builders came on the 22^nd and went away immediately because we had “the wrong type of scaffolding” (it was corrected within six hours)  and they didn’t come back for a week. I suspect the window hasn’t even been made yet.

Tony the painter however is brilliant. He and his mate arrived at 8:30 on Tuesday 22^nd, and he’s still here. They spent the first five days solely in preparation, rubbing down the outside of the house. Then four thick coats of lush white sandtex. It looks succulent, probably the best it’s looked since it was built in 1883.

There was a sofa in the office which was surplus to requirements. So we called the council’s Large Object Disposal Service and they told us to put it in the front garden for collection. Then Von remembered the glass panelled doors which used to disfigure the dining room and drawing room. We had found replacement doors in a skip and had replaced them a decade ago. The glass panelled doors — a particularly revolting opaque bathroom glass — were relegated to the basement. “Let’s throw them away!” she suggested. So we added them to the council’s takeaway list.

Yesterday was Collection Day. The sofa disappeared, the doors remained. We rang the council. “Someone else could have taken your sofa,” they suggested. We called back to chase them later on. “Yes, we took the sofa,” they confirmed, “but your doors were too big.”

Too big? These are standard internal doors from a London terraced house. “What defines Too Big?” we asked. There was humming and hawing from the other end. “The maximum door size we can accept,” said the voice, “is six feet by two feet. ”

Six feet high. Both Von and I would have to duck going through a six foot doorframe. Nobody makes six foot doors. “What size are the doors in your office?” we asked. Six foot, came the reply. “That’s ludicrous,” we said. “We’d have to duck to get through every door.” “We’re all short in this office,” volunteered the voice.

So the doors remain in our front garden. Today a man came round and photographed them. Tony the painter didn’t mention if he was a particularly short man.

My famous Short Door Incident occurred many years ago when I went to see the science fiction writer Harlan Ellison at his home in Los Angeles. Mr Ellison is a gentleman of restricted growth, and the door openings in his house referenced this; we had to stoop to get through every one of them.

Except one. The door to his study was no more than a couple of feet high. The only way to get in was on hands and knees. Inside, Harlan sat in state on a high chair behind a massive desk on a plinth. It was quite a statement. I looked at this puzzle and remembered a similar situation had presented itself to a British Ambassador to a far distant Asian court in the nineteenth century.

I copied HMG’s solution, and entered the room backwards. The first sight Harlan had of me was my great wobbling arse in his face.

Fair play, he saw the funny side and laughed uproariously. We were pals immediately. Apparently no one had thought of that means of entry before.