Swedish Death Cleaning. Whereby the adult siblings bully their parents into clearing out all the household detritus from the last three decades before it becomes a critical issue, and more pertinently, their own problem. It’s a case of prepping before the ‘oldies’ join the great majority. Or, as I now find it, creating another garden compost heap.

We’ve hesitantly offered our assistances in making a tentative start to some death-cleaning and John, with alarming alacrity, has not hesitated to accept. A plan of attack is formulated which has a chain-of-receding consequences. The shed (aka The Glory Hole) at the bottom of the garden needs to be cleared so as those three decades of accumulations can be deposited therein. Everybody knows that much will be destined for the cowp/dump/déchetterie, but there is a process of grieving that has to be followed. The shed has to become a purgatorial halfway house.

However to access the ‘shed-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden’, first it will be necessary to clear a path, hack back the vegetation, the tangled jungle of wisteria, ivy and decaying leaves. Which inevitably leads to the next conundrum; where to deposit all the hackings and clearings? The existing compost bin is adequate for what comes out the kitchen but not for a decade of luxuriant garden growth.

Build another? Out of what? The answers aren’t immediately obvious, in the main because they’re lost in the shed’s murk of gloomy recesses, consumed by cobwebs and an archive of children’s toys – toys long deceased. Even without knowing the inventory I know an answer has be in there. And it is.

Housesitting adverts always extol their pets, the home’s attributes, with an accompanying gallery of photos to verify the claims. Addendums on the proximity to food shops and quaint country pubs will be added, yet strangely, they never mention the compost heap.

Composting is alchemic. Turning lead into gold; base-metal banana skins into life-blood soil. The latter somewhat more easily achievable than cooking mercury or boiling toads. Simply chop, mix, stir then add the magic ingredient and leave nature to manage the transmutation. Eventually humans will come to learn that the elixir of perpetual life will not be decanted from a flask oozing mind-bending noxious fumes but will be the preservation and creation of soil.

It’s occurred on several ‘house-sits’. After a few days I’m looking for ‘something-to-do’. The borders have been weeded and the grass is cut, the alpaca poop collected and the grouting of moss in the monoblock scraped out; it’s time to inspect the ‘heap’. Now I can enter a happy place, becoming the sorcerer’s apprentice, to garner and resurrect, to resuscitate and revive a failing heap. I’ve probably got a mere week to raise the temperature of the dead slime-cold mound, with its pockets of dry desiccated leaves, empty egg shells, and bunches of faded petrol station roses.

Strangely, over that time I’ve come on many ‘heaps’ that are several years old, are mounds of sweet smelling, friable compost, yet they’ve never been spread. Strangely, and equally inevitably, there will be a pile of proprietary bagged composts stacked where they were lifted from the back of a car after a Sunday afternoon’s trip to the local garden centre…. last year.

By day six the ‘heap’ is oozing steam; it’s working and I have to decide how to explain the ‘magic’ ingredient. I could euphemistically suggest that the male of the species, Homo sapiens, has the plumbing to administer the ‘magic’ ingredient. But I don’t. However, if that is in short supply, I just collect sheep’s droppings to make a brew to feed the bacteria and microbes to help kick-start a heap. (It’s better I collect it than the dog I’m responsible for walking, does).

About half the ‘shed’s’ floor is now vacant, an uninhabited space that is magnetised, the lodestone has been placed, so it should be no surprise that a table and a cupboard have moved in. Pieces that have increased the availability of flat space, surfaces of allure, to attract more ‘stuff’. And ‘stuff’ attracts ‘stuff’.

As for the döstädning, I doubt if we’ve even made an impression, despite the two runs to the recycling centre and the queue of bags lined up on the narrow pavement outside, awaiting the council’s collection. (Caen’s local authority collects six evenings per week, eighteen times more frequently than at home). However there is a new ‘heap’ of moldering leaves and a ‘bug-hotel’ that has taken on the proportions of a highrise condominium, with one prospective bumblebee tenant expressing an interest.

Postscript: just received a note: “did we, (the collective ‘we’) fling out a small yellow bike?” It must be some subconscious human response, remove a piece of ‘stuff’ and its original owner reacts. They haven’t seen ‘it’, let alone used ‘it’ in two decades, but still a subliminal reaction is triggered. Our only conceivable response has to be…. when have the PBs ever disposed of a bicycle? Those beyond rideability grace our garden wall.