Oliver Holt describes clearing out the Cheshire cottage where his parents lived for decades after his father’s death and his mother, actor Eileen Derbyshire, moved into a retirement home. Derbyshire played Emily Bishop in Coronation Street for 56 years, and the process of emptying the house brought Holt face to face with a lifetime of family memories, possessions and emotional attachments.

The cottage contained Holt’s schoolbooks, football shirts, newspaper cuttings of his journalism, childhood furniture, his daughters’ toys and drawings, and Beatles autographs Derbyshire had carefully hidden away. Although an auctioneer said the family’s brown furniture had little value, Holt filled skip after skip with belongings, finding the task painful because each discarded object connected him to his parents and their shared past.