So I’ve been digging out the crap caches, and while most of the stuff I’m finding is crap, some of it’s actually valuable or at least entertaining. Whilst digging through an enormous wooden bowl of cruft, I found a laser cat toy I bought a couple of years ago, when I found it in the pet Christmas present display at Sainsbury’s, and which Flash found intermittently entertaining until it disappeared into the cruft bowl. Surprisingly, the battery is still working, and so I spent about ten minutes exercising old fatboy with the red dot. Until he figured out the exciting red dot was coming from the shiny silver thing in my hand, at which point he ran up and started rubbing his cheek pads against it. (I was sitting on the floor.) I was shocked that he appeared to have figured it out. Cognition seems to have happened, and I’m really not sure what to make of it.

Understand: this cat is stupid. Oh god, is he stupid. He has a certain degree of craftiness to his stupidity; he is, after all, a cat, and he’s got enough going on between his fuzzy ears to keep us attending to his needs and humouring his little quirks. I suppose it’s unfair of me to categorise him as stupid, since he is, in fact, exactly as smart as he needs to be, which isn’t very, since the kibble is going to keep coming and the used litter is going to keep going, and being a cat, he isn’t going to work any harder than he needs to, once those needs are met.

Then, of course, we come to the (very) small fortune in change I found in the same bowl, and the bottoms of departing handbags and pockets of off-season coats, along with the change dumped into various baskets and boxes for what reason I cannot tell you, other than to say money is valuable, and thus, small amounts of it wind up in nominally safe places until they can be consolidated into a large enough quantity to be taken in and fed to the coin machine. Yes, it’s kind of a rip off, but I’ll pay a smallish commission to spare myself having to roll coins to take to the bank.

Once again, I unearthed my sole surviving pair of Fat Pants, which I keep as a memento morbid obesity, and pull out on these periodic purges, to gape at their size, because holy shit. Holy shit. I knew I was that fat — my eyes certainly weren’t bigger than my stomach, but they worked well enough to let me know I was extremely fat — but graphic proof is still stunning. Brrrr.

So I offloaded a bunch of stuff, including things Phil has shrunk out of (yay, Phil!) and things that have no use, and found some good stuff that got buried under the useless stuff in the process, so it’s all good. How we came to own the three unused electric toothbrushes I found while cleaning out the bathroom cabinets is a mystery to me, since I didn’t buy them, but I’m assuming they were gifts from my late mother-in-law. I think we’re set on those for quite some time. I emptied and moved my biggest chest of drawers to vacuum behind it, and found the beautiful silver and garnet ring I bought in Edinburgh a couple of years ago, which, outside of a bit of tarnish, is as lovely as ever.

I don’t feel like I’m anywhere near done with this project — the dreaded understair cupboard remains, for example, and Oh God the Books — but I think I’m falling into a habit of spending an hour or so decluttering every morning, and it helps me feel like I will eventually get to where I want to be, which is in a house where I don’t feel oppressed by its contents.