Accumulation

Having spend so much time - and so many emotions - ridding myself of so many of my worldly goods I now find myself in the strange position of having to gather unto myself various new possessions. Silly things really. After sharing my living space for all my life, I've come to take certain items for granted - like tin openers for example. Or cutlery and crockery. Or a drying rack for clothes (are these really called clothes horses? I fail to see the resemblance). How these things entered my life before, I'm not entirely certain. They could have been left after a visit by benevolent elves in the dead of night, or perhaps more prosaically by equally benevolent mothers and flatmates. Probably not in the dead of night, though. Alas, currently shorn as I am of both flatmates and mothers (and seemingly shunned by the fair folk as well), I'm now left to fend for myself when it comes to such matters.

Naturally, the sensible thing to do would be to sit down and carefully consider what necessities I'm currently lacking in order to produce a list that I might then take an afternoon in which to hunt then all down at once. Of course, I've done exactly the opposite - namely I continually wait until I realise I need something, at which point it's usually to late in the evening to do anything about it. I'll then make a mental note to rectify the situation at the next available opportunity and promptly forget to do so. This is why I ended up slurping breakfast of out a perspex cooking dish for a few days before I finally remembered to buy a spoon and a bowl. It's also why I've continued to struggle to pierce the hide of lone tin of tomatoes which sits sadly on a shelf. To be fair to myself, I did remember to go a purchase a tin opener (eventually), but, for reasons which remain inexplicable to me, I returned with a bottle opener instead. Whilst they're both devices intended to open sealed containers, I've discovered, to my cost, that the mechanisms behind each are suitably different that they cannot easily be substituted for one another.

My tin of tomatoes lives to see another day...