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The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Photos of spectacular fireworks light up American skies on the Fourth of July
The Fourth of July is about all things American: parades, cookouts, cold beer and of course, fireworks. Those pyrotechnics remain at the center of Independence Day, a holiday 247 years in the making. Massive fireworks lit up the skyline of multiple American cities, marking festivities across the country. Despite widespread education efforts, thousands of Americans are badly injured by fireworks each year. Still, consumer sales of fireworks have rapidly grown over the past two decades. Statistics from the American Pyrotechnics Association show that in 2000, American consumers spent $407 million on fireworks. By 2024, that figure rose to $2.2 billion. — This is a photo gallery curated by AP photo editors.
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
The 11 rules of decluttering I learnt when I packed up my life to relocate
Next month, my family and I are moving to the United States. Not for ever, just for a couple of years, for my husband's job. We have signed a rental agreement on a furnished house and will ship the bare essentials to turn it into a home. We have a shipping allowance of 15 cubic metres – equivalent in size to 52 washing machines – and the rest of our belongings will go into storage. Consequently, the past month or so has been a frantic whirl of sorting, stowing and throwing. Not only do we have to decide on what we can't live without, but we also have to work out what will fill us with joy when we open the storage unit in two years, rather than make us wonder why on earth we hung on to it. Which means that almost every possession has had to be assessed for its value to us and its fate decided. We're working on the basis that unless furniture is either useful or meaningful, we can get rid of it. So far, we have sold a piano (meaningful, but my husband also owns a piano and we don't need two); my middle son's bed (a nightmare to put together); a redundant chest of drawers; a drum kit; and a tumble dryer (easily and cheaply replaceable). We have ferried countless carloads to the dump, flogged possessions at a car boot sale, restocked all the local charity shops and furnished all our friends with cast-offs. Our packers come next week. This is what I've learnt along the way about how to decide what you really need to hang on to – whether you're downsizing, or simply decluttering. 1. Colour coding is your friend Susanna Hammond of Sorted Living gave me one of the most useful pieces of advice to help organise both my things and my mind: buy a multipack of different-coloured rolls of masking tape on Amazon. 'Create a key, and assign each of your possessions a colour from A through to G,' she tells me. 'Those in the A group are definitely coming with you; Bs and Cs might make it; and G is going to the dump. If everything in the house has a square of coloured masking tape on it for a week or two, it helps focus the mind.' She's not wrong. I used seven colours: green was stuff definitely coming with us, yellow was for possible items, blue-stickered things were to go to storage, pink to hand on to family and friends, red to sell, purple to go to charity, and orange for the tip. After initially assigning almost all of our pictures green tape for A possessions, for example, I realised we didn't need to take that many things to hang on our walls, so half of them were reassigned blue tape and some turned pink. Over time, we whittled things down, occasionally replacing one colour of tape with another. 2. Work out what means 'home' to you 'We have to take the clock!' exclaimed my 14-year-old when he saw I'd stuck a yellow (for 'maybe') sticker on our kitchen timepiece. The clock was something he'd associated with home and the kitchen all his life – which meant hanging it in our new kitchen would make that feel like home, too. Ditto our ancient world-map kitchen table oilcloth, four candlesticks, a couple of rugs that hang on the end of the sofa and a little picture I picked up on holiday years ago that has always hung somewhere near the cooker. Once we'd collectively worked out the things that made us all feel safe and our surroundings familiar, it made it much easier to pick which decorative things to take with us. 3. You can get rid of books even if you're a book lover I have always been deeply suspicious of anyone who has no books in their home. For me, books are not only an essential part of life, but make a home cosy: I have consequently dragged boxes of them with me every time I've moved. But I can't take my entire library stateside, and I've gradually realised that I don't need to store all of them for two years either. A handful will come with me, and others are non-negotiable when it comes to storage: the novels I return to again and again. But do I really need to hang on to that enormous biographical encyclopedia when Wikipedia is much more up to date? And is it entirely necessary to keep the entire works of Thomas Hardy just because I studied him at GCSE? I've decided retaining a couple of my favourite Hardys will suffice; that the book on how remote working has changed the world that I've been meaning to read for the past three years can always be taken out of the library; and that the newly glaring gaps on the shelves will be filled within a matter of months anyway. 4. Don't hang on to things just because they 'might' come in handy one day In my mind and in my kitchen cupboards, I am a person who can throw a dinner party for 20 people at short notice. In reality, I favour having no more than six people to supper at a time, because that way you get to talk to everybody. Nevertheless, my kitchen shelves are (or were) groaning with plates, glassware, vases, baking trays and other accoutrements more suitable to mass catering than my everyday life. Working out what I needed to cater for the odd social gathering plus my family for the next two years helped me realise that actually, I probably didn't need that enormous pan, or the beautiful but impractical copper bowl that I have used precisely once, or a vast collection of glass vases when these days I prefer to stick tulips in a jug. 5. You don't have to do it all in one go Decluttering is exhausting, as it entails so many emotional decisions, but you don't have to blitz it all in one go. 'Your brain needs time to process,' says Sian Pelleschi, the president of the Association of Professional Declutterers and Organisers. 'If you're not sure about something, put it aside and come back to it later.' The same goes for even the boring, relatively easy tasks with less emotional attachment, such as sorting through your Tupperware. Rachel Cordingley, who runs the decluttering service A Tidy Mind, advises using a coffee break, for example, to sort through the kitchen junk drawer, or giving yourself 10 minutes to whistle through a bookshelf. If you spend a whole day decluttering, you'll get decision fatigue, but start doing a little, often, and you'll get on a roll. 6. It's OK to pay for time to consider I haven't had as much time or mental bandwidth as I'd have liked to work out what I want to keep or chuck. A case in point: the boxes of old magazine and newspaper clippings of work that I really need to spend some time sorting through – time I don't have right now. 'You can assess that in the future; you don't need to think about it now,' is Pelleschi's advice when I ask her about this. Consequently, I know that these and a couple of boxes of other things will go into storage and that I will have to sort through them properly when I get back – but that's OK. I'd rather do it properly than in a rush and regret it. 7. Get someone to help you A couple of months before we moved, a great friend whizzed up on the train for 24 hours. I was feeling overwhelmed by my bulging wardrobe; she is a ruthless decluttering fiend whose own closet is streamlined to the max. With my pal's truthful yet compassionate eye I was able to admit that, yes, those jumpsuits no longer did anything for me; the navy wool trousers that were my go-to office attire could be replaced with a more flattering pair; and the Ganni dress I pulled out and put back every time I went out didn't fit me well. Within a mere hour, I had an enormous pile of clothes to put on Vinted, another pile for the charity shop, and another to be packed away for the colder months. Now I have a wardrobe of clothes I can actually wear and that, crucially, I know will work for the life I have right now. A second pair of eyes can be a useful barometer, for everything from clothes to kitchenware. 8. Imagine you're shopping your house The advantage of being able to take only a small selection of our things meant that I had actively to decide what to take rather than what to leave. Professional move manager Sarah Myers is a general believer in making life simpler, and came over to help me do this. In practice, this meant emptying out my kitchen cupboards one by one and picking out my 10 favourite mugs, the 10 drinking glasses I like best, my prettiest plates, the saucepans I can't live without and so on – almost as if I were in a cookware shop, picking out a wedding list. All the rest either went into storage or to the car boot sale. 9. Have an exit strategy Because this was such a big move, we had to plan ahead, so we knew that we'd sell our tumble dryer, fridge and piano, but also that this might take a little time. Planning a specific exit strategy for the bigger pieces – that this item needed to be gone within this time window, and if it didn't sell we'd take it to a charity shop, for example – meant that the whole task was far less overwhelming. 10. Know that most things are replaceable Don't agonise over whether to keep everyday things that generally don't hold lots of sentimental value and can easily be replaced if necessary. 'If your house was about to burn down in flames, what would you grab?' asks Cordingley. For most people that would be their phone, their handbag, their passport, their computer and maybe a couple of sentimental items – probably not that set of saucepans from your wedding list. Yes it's annoying to find yourself rebuying something you once owned, but you'll more than likely find you manage perfectly well without it. 11. Decluttering is a skill everybody can learn 'All decluttering is emotional and habit-based,' says Cher Casey, a professional organiser, who comes to help me sort through my children's stuff with them. 'But it's a skill and everybody can learn how to do it.' Casey says that children can be incredibly receptive to the idea of letting go of things, and gently asks each of my three children how they feel about certain items, giving them time to consider their response. At the end of a couple of hours, my eldest son has a single box of possessions that he wants to take with him to America, my middle child has two boxes, and the youngest about the same. Casey's suggestion of taking pictures of things that they insisted they had to keep and I was adamant should go (my middle son's immense collection of Prime bottles, for example) was also a good one – a halfway house to the actual chucking. How to get rid of things you don't need The Sell Your Books app allows you to scan a barcode on any book and it will tell you how much money it will give you for it. Once you've reached a minimum of 10 items or £5 worth of value, you box up the books and someone will come and collect them; they go off to be checked and then the money hits your bank account. If you've got drawers full of pens, pencils, half-used notebooks and the like, most primary schools will happily take them off your hands (just tear out any used pages in notebooks and so on first). Dunelm, Marks & Spencer, H&M, John Lewis and George at Asda all offer textile recycling: take them a bagful of (clean) old clothes, towels or bedding and they will recycle them for you. The last three retailers all also offer vouchers towards future purchases, too. Old tins of paint that are still usable can be donated to Community RePaint, which redistributes paint to community groups or those in need. If you're taking paint to a recycling centre, you need to make sure it has hardened first. If you've got an assortment of usable household items but can't get to a charity shop, book a collection with Anglo Doorstep Collections. The site will tell you when the next run is happening in your area and you simply leave a box for your collection on your front doorstep.
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Jamie George: Let's make it hard for Lions lads to win back jerseys
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