A fake flower, bought for Uni project, to demonstrate that things that are not biological can look as though they are. It’s one of the things that was lying on the dining table awaiting a home for months. I finally cut its fake stalk to fit into a vase and here it is. A fake. The dining room got reborn as a usable room in our home only a few days ago and it’s already bitten the dust as a place to eat, which depresses me somewhat, although it is for a good cause.

We’re trying desperately to de-clutter our world so have set up a new mini-studio in there to photograph all of the stuff we’re about to try to sell on ebay. We’ve got so much stuff that will never, ever get used again but we keep it “just in case”. I do wonder how we have so much stuff when we spend more time at the dump than any other human beings alive. They greet us like long-lost family when we turn up down there with yet another car load of old tat.

So, we’re entering a new era and it’s all going to be freshly evaluated and hopefully some more of it will end up living in someone else’s house. Frankly, the more stuff that goes, the better. I’m sick to the back teeth of clutter. In fact, I’m thinking of just shoving it all into black sacks and taking it to the dump…yes, spending even more time there than hitherto.

In the new regime we will be refusing freebies that are pointless – I’ve just binned a plastic brain given to me by one of the teaching unions. I think it was meant to be a stress-buster but it’s just nasty junk and whoever decided it’d be a good thing to give away to student teachers needs to have a rethink about what’s important in life. No. No. No.