I just can’t help it.
As soon as the days warm and the afternoons stretch out into evening, I feel a compulsive urge to fill the bins with old papers and cardboard and cobwebbed poly pipe that’s been hanging around the carport all year.
I reckon it must be the relentless push of life coming up through the earth to crowd the world with new stuff that makes you want to get rid of the old stuff.
The old has to give way to the new, and you just have to make room I suppose.
When I was small, at the start of spring, I used to help my old ma lift up the rugs from the house and drag them outside to hang them on the washing line.
She would then get a carpet beater which looked like a tennis racquet with a long handle and whack the hell out of the rugs with a strength that seemed to come from nowhere.
It was like a switch had been flicked and this gentle little Scottish woman became a rage-filled banshee with a contorted face and muscular racquet arm swung with the force of a Venus Williams serve.
I watched in awe as the air filled with the detritus of a year’s worth of cigarette ash, dog hair, biscuit crumbs and dead skin.
It made me wonder how we ever lived with that cloud of all our yesterdays under our feet.
How did we not die of legionnaire’s disease or bubonic plague?
But we didn’t because people like my mother spring cleaned.
After her carpet-beating session, my mum sat down and had a nice cup of tea and a chat with the neighbour who was often doing her own carpet beating.
Then I helped her take the rugs off the washing line, roll them up and put them back down in the house.
There’s a whole era of social upheaval contained in those images – a rage-filled woman cleaning up the mess that men have made and then sitting down for a chat.
A lot has happened since then; women work, lead big companies, become doctors and lawyers, go to gyms, and play football, but I reckon they still do most of the cleaning, while men do the mucking up.
There’s a big clean-up job about to start on the other side of the world right now, but it’s not tied to the seasons of nature.
It’s tied more to men and their seasons of age-old rage and violence.
And when the dust settles, they too eventually have to sit down and talk.
Perhaps it’s a dream too far, but we all hope they can relay their carpets, clear the air and get back to the ordinary business of living and talking as neighbours.
Wherever you are, spring is a good time to beat out the dust of tired old thinking and replant the soil with fresh ideas.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News
9°C