While the cat's away

One summer, many years ago, my mother went back-packing round Thailand with a friend. As soon as they'd set off for the airport, my father lined my sister and me up in the kitchen and said "Right! Let's start clearing things out!" We'd soon created a huge pile of old ice-cream tubs, manky tupperware boxes, and the various bits of everyday flotsam and jetsam that my mother couldn't bear to throw out. She was (and still is) a firm believer that "it might come in useful one day." My father, on the other hand, held to the principle that if you hadn't used it in a year, you were never going to use it and it should be binned. The result was a constant battle between hoarder and chucker, one that I've managed to replicate with PJ. I bin; he keeps.

And, just as my father took advantage of my mother's 6-week South-East Asian adventure, so I'm making the most of PJ's 2-week West Coast sojourn. Piles of magazines? Gone to recycling! Two bags of clothes? Off to the second-hand shop! The contents of the bathroom cabinet? Bagged and binned! This latter task was somewhat archaeological in nature, delving down through the accumulated layers of half-used moisturizers, greasy bottles of sun-tan lotion, and soaps -- lots and lots of hotel soaps. While they represent a history of holidays and business trips over the past four years, I'm not convinced that keeping several hundredweight of Aveda bath soap from the Hotel@MIT is better than taking pictures. Neither is hanging on to the plastic packs of Virgin Airlines amenities, or even the rather flashy but utterly useless Oswald Boateng cases that you get in Upper Class.* And it is a blessed relief to see a huge bag of this detritus ready to go out in tomorrow's garbage collection.

Heh: That'll teach him to go away!

* PJ: I haven't binned the Boateng stuff. Or most of the soaps. Promise.