Moving with the times

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    Spotlight Audio 2/2020
    Colin Beaven vor Großbritannien-Flagge
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    Von Colin Beaven

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    Transcript: Moving with the times 

    My wife and I have moved! Moving is always traumatic; it’s even worse when you’ve lived in the same place for 24 years. We now live somewhere smaller, so we had to get rid of all the old furniture that wasn’t going to fit.
    It really was old — not valuable, just “brown furniture”, the sort of thing antique shops used to sell so much of: Victorian and Edwardian mahoganyMahagonimahogany, all now completely out of fashion.
    Which is why there aren’t as many antique shops as there once were. But there’s still Des. He should have retired long ago, but he loves restoring antique furniture, so he’s still in business. He told us what we expected to hear: nobody wants the stuff.
    He’s always been more enthusiastic about selling than buying, but even making to make allowances for sth.etw. berücksichtigenallowances for that, we knew he was right. We just hoped he could sell our furniture on to someone who wouldn’t paint it and turn it into coffee tables: someone who’d enjoy it. Or use it for film sets. We contacted Nathan, who came to have a look. Nathan buys stuff he thinks could be used on film sets — not Star Wars or Fast & Furious, but films that take place in the past.
    There must be old couples in cinemas all over the country saying: “Look, that’s our old wardrobe they’re using.” Before we moved, we saw Pain and Glory, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film. The hero’s bright red kitchen looked exactly like ours. “bloodyverdammtBloody Nathan!” we said. “He’s taken our kitchen.” And we to rushhetzen, eilenrushed back home, only to find that he hadn’t taken anything.
    Thankfully, friends of Des came to our rescue. They were old-school dealers — out to make a profit, but gentlemen.
    Getting rid of furniture’s bad enough, but books are even worse. Hundreds of them had to go to charity shopkaritativer Second-Hand-Ladencharity shops, which is where many of them came from in the first place. Why did I have so many? It was clearly tsundoku, the Japanese word for buying books you never read. Or perhaps it was judo, possibly jujitsu. After all, I was fighting — fighting my genes. With a librarianBibliothekar(in)librarian for a father, I was always going to be a black belt at tsundoku.
    Now, though, the Oxfam shop is full of my second-ratezweitklassigsecond-rate novels and out-of-date textbooks, like Europe since 1939 to the Present — the “present” being the 1990s, when Britain was excited about 1992, the single marketBinnenmarktsingle market and expanding the EU, and when there was a market for books on the subject.
    Now, they’re even less use than brown furniture. with hindsightrückblickend, im NachhineinWith hindsight, it would have been simpler to turn the whole house into an Oxfam shop, with absolutely everything for sale, including me.
    I still think it was short-sightedkurzsichtigshort-sighted of Nathan not to make us an offer. Even the Fast & Furious films will one day come to an end. Our books and furniture could be useful for the set of Hollywood’s next film franchise. Not if it’s futuristic or action-packed, but ideal if they call it Past & Curious

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