The Part You Throw Away: Mysterious Shit My Kids Get Out Of Vending Machines

It’s hard to predict which things my children are going to truly value. I’ve had the experience of watching my little ones play for hours with the box rather than the contents. I’ve provided gorgeous, plushy, irresistibly cute lovies for them to go to bed with, then watched them fall in love with a cross-eyed [...]

Read Full Post »

The Part You Throw Away: Tin Opener

I predict that one day soon, I am going to be on the television. It will be on one of those List programmes that programme makers use to fill late-night slots where almost everyone watching is drunk and a little bit lonely. It will be called something like “Top 100 Stupidest Domestic Accidents” and will [...]

Read Full Post »

The Part You Throw Away: Christmas Cards For Near Relatives

This Is Almost As Bad As Suddenly Discovering You’re A Tory. I mean, it’s not as if I have anything against greetings cards in the abstract. I even quite enjoy choosing them sometimes – especially for birthdays. My personal taste runs towards deliberately incorrect age-milestones and the ones with the kind of joke you don’t [...]

Read Full Post »

The Part You Throw Away: Shoe Boxes

We Still Have The Same Problem. But Now We Have It For A Different Reason. Shoe-boxes are a major cause of cognitive dissonance for me. For years, I have held two parallel and perfectly opposing beliefs. Belief one: shoe-boxes are infinitely useful and can be used for all manner of amazing craft projects, ranging from [...]

Read Full Post »

The Part You Throw Away: Plastic Sandwich Boxes

Even I Am Quite Ashamed Of This One My kids get through a lot of lunch-boxes. This is the inevitable consequence of their disgusting habit of bringing home their sandwich crusts, apple cores and mostly-empty yoghurt-pots for me to deal with (I mean, they have bins at school. They do. I’ve seen them. Furthermore, I’ve [...]

Read Full Post »

The Part You Throw Away: Detergent Samples

Dear Mr Detergent Manufacturer, I think we need to have a little chat about a couple of slightly scary subjects, as follows: Pregnancy, and Commitment. See, back when I was first pregnant, in the summer of 2002, you got together with Bounty and gave me a large plastic carrier bag full of free samples. Specifically, [...]

Read Full Post »

The Part You Throw Away: Mobile Phone Cables

  Because Clearly, Manufacturers Are Putting Loads Of Expensive Cabling In My Phone Box For Absolutely No Reason. These are, apparently, the cables that came in the box with my last mobile phone, which is a BlackBerry Bold, and is very nice. I say “apparently” because I’ve never actually been allowed access to them. And [...]

Read Full Post »

The Part You Throw Away: Empty Boxes

In Which I Prove In At Least Two Ways That Even A Stopped Clock Is Right Twice A Day I confidently predict that responses to this post will divide entirely along gender lines. There, I said it. Thing is, I like to think of myself as someone who, most of the time, avoids gender stereotyping. [...]

Read Full Post »

The Part You Throw Away: Needle-Threaders

It May Surprise You To Know That Needlepoint Is Actually A Totally Kick-Ass Hobby When my friends and I were at university, we went through one of those rebellious phases you do go through in your late teens and early twenties. Some people choose the traditional vices (sex; drugs; alcohol; live music; World Of Warcraft), but we [...]

Read Full Post »

The Part You Throw Away: The Story Of The First Thing I Really, Desperately Wanted To Throw Away

In The Beginning, God Probably Had A Lot Of Useless Stuff Left Over When He’d Finished. And He Insisted On Keeping It, And That Made His Wife Really, Really Angry Many years ago, back when Prince Charles was still on his first wife and nobody in the North had electric lights, the boyfriend at the [...]

Read Full Post »