Nicholas Read: One person’s treasure is another person’s trash — and that goes for the family china

It’s spring at last — time to clean and declutter. (Yes, both Oxford and Webster assert that declutter is a word.) I was reminded of this by a friend who said she had a friend who had decided to put her china in the dishwasher — and to hell with the consequences.

Consequences? It turns out what she meant is that china is often old and delicate and therefore subject to cracks, chips or even breakage in a dishwasher, so most people prefer to wash it by hand. The things you discover at teatime — sometimes over china cups. But that wasn’t the point, which was that the children of my friend’s friend had declared to their parents that they had no interest in retaining the porcelain or anything else “nominally” precious in the family home, so why bother looking after it?

It also turned out that my friend had had a similar conversation with her own children. Yes, they definitely wanted their grandmother’s paintings, but not much else. For one, they had no room for it, and for another they had objects enough of their own, thank you.