What is it with men and wood?
Why do they want to keep random bits of it?
Jimmy and I spent much of the bank holiday weekend attending to somewhat tedious but necessary house and garden tasks. Now we’ve arrived at the thrilling job of taking a redundant Ikea Billy bookshelf to the tip. Yep, one of the many Billies we bought in something like 1997, to tide us over.
We bought a lot of ‘tiding over’ things back then: depressing mugs, dismal flat pillows and as many Billies as we could cram into our home.
‘They’re a bit studenty,’ we conceded. ‘But they’ll do for now.’ So how come we still have all this stuff? Keeping an item for 26 years isn’t the definition of a tiding-over thing. It’s a permanent fixture. You’ve already owned it for something like a third of your life.
Anyway - I’m rejoicing today as at long last, one of those blasted Billies is going to the tip.
Or is it?
Jimmy: ‘If I take the bookshelf as well as the bags of hedge clippings, there won’t be room for you in the car.’
Me, sensing the possibility of being able to avoid going to the tip: ‘Oh dear never mind.’
J: ‘I don’t actually think we should get rid of the bookcase.’
Me: ‘No, we should. We’ve been saying for ages how much we hate them.’
J: ‘No, but big long pieces of wood like that, they might come in handy.’
Me: ‘No, we don’t need it.’
J: ‘We might, though. It’s wood. You never know when it might be useful—’
Me: ‘We never need bits of wood. Absolutely never. I mean, what would we use it for?’
J, indignant: ‘All kinds of things!’
Me: ‘I’m not really into this keeping-wood-thing. We have bits of old plank in the meter cupboard—’
J: ‘It wouldn’t need to go in there. It could go in the cupboard under the stairs...’
This, I should explain, is not our cupboard under our stairs. As we live in a flat, we don’t have any stairs of our own. While J is correct in that there’s ‘a’ cupboard under ‘the’ stairs, I’m not sure who it belongs to. ‘I need to check the deeds,’ I keep saying, and I would - if only I could remember where I put them (Back in 1997, as well as believing our Billy bookshelves were temporary, I also believed I’d grow into the kind of woman who’d know where all documents are, at all times - property deeds especially).
Jimmy doesn’t need to consult the deeds as he believes the cupboard is ours. So confident is he of this fact that he’s crammed the dank and spidery space with our stuff - including bits of old wood left over from previous projects - and whacked a hefty padlock on it. He has colonised the cupboard under the stairs.
Me: ‘I don’t think we should keep it. It’s not even real wood*.’
J: ‘What’s the problem with keeping it under the stairs?’
Me: ‘It’s just getting filled up with junk—’
J: ‘What else are you planning to do in there? Play table tennis?’
Me, curtly: ‘I might!’
Choose your battles they say. Marriage is one gigantic decades-long compromise, some else (probably) said.
Soon after our discussion I become aware of something being smashed up in our hallway. Installed on the sofa with my laptop and a cup of tea, I decide not to investigate.
‘Ready!’ Jimmy calls out, then beckons me to go and see. I look around at the bits of smashed up bookcase all over the floor.
‘So it is going to the tip?’ I ask.
‘Yep. And now it’ll fit in the boot so you can come too.’
Yippee!
Love, Fiona xx
PS Why is it WOOD* that men want to keep and not, say, unwieldy slabs of plastic or cushion foam? Is it because they secretly want to be woodsmen?
PPS *It’s not actually wood, it’s ‘oak veneer’!!!
My Dad had a garage full of wood for things he was going to build one day!
My husbands mantra when keeping anything from assorted rusty screws to odd shaped bits of plastic is “you never know when this might come in useful”. We have several outbuildings filled with such items.