After installing her new desk (which would inspire creativity and greatly improve efficiency) and cleaning her study for three days, Adelaide still could not find a home for:
1. Three pairs of old glasses, one in a good and robust case. All unscratched, but unflattering
2. Large box of rubber bands
3. Anne Geddes gift bag – really not Adelaide’s cup of tea, but still in very good condition
4. Coaster…ooh, that fits just nicely next to computer
5. UniSA photocopy access card from brief encounter as an academic several years ago
6. Cassette of INXS: the swing, still in its original case
7. One child’s sock
8. Two bookmarks from Griffith Review Making Perfect Bodies edition
9. One lipstick best described as off-coffee. Unmelted
10. One 45c Christmas stamp
11. One large bent paperclip, one large unbent paperclip
12. Child’s coathanger
13. Small rusty photoframe
14. Ticket for London buses
15. Several copies of two different types of business cards
16. Two wooden dolly pegs
17. One packet of very, very small rubberbands
18. Assorted rubber bands likely to break the next time they are used
19. Four hair bands
20. Various coins from far-off shores
21. Roll of cheap, thin sticky tape
22. Two snowmen from the carriage of a Swiss-made Christmas train which was carried all the way back to Australia by a loving Granny
23. Hungry Hippos marble
24. Backup disk of a much-loved, but going nowhere, long piece of fiction
25. Adelaide(confidential) contact details ripped from the pages of The Advertiser
26. Two written, addressed, stamped and unsent Christmas cards
27. Line up of the usual suspects of badges (it’s timor’s oil; peace in the world begins at home; vote 1 greeens etc etc etc)
28. Photo of The Mister one sunset at Death Valley
29. Frequent flyer points card
30. Decaying plastic peg (faded blue)
31. One cassette of Chinese pop star bought twenty years ago on first overseas trip
32. Business card of one old friend Adelaide had bumped into at the market one day and who had said we must catch up soon with such confidence Adelaide had thought perhaps they might
I just left all that stuff heaped in a corner of the new desk for a few months, then when I needed the space for a fresher batch of kipple, I put it in a plastic bag and shoved it up the back of the spare room wardrobe.
My pile includes bumper stickers I’m now not game to stick, lest some passing RWDB, emboldened by ten years of this government’s tacit enabling of the worst in all of us (greed, racism, philistinism, envy, selfishness etc etc) should see fit to key or otherwise deface my car once he has identified me as a wussy girly feminist animal-loving pagan bleeding heart: ‘What goes around comes around: give blood’; ‘My other car is a broom’; and ‘WWF for a living planet’ complete with stylised panda.
You can put the stickers on your fridge perhaps. I put my Not Happy John sticker on the letterbox and nothing happened except that it went missing.
If there is any credit on the photocopy card, I could liberate it for you…..
It has already gone to a new home I’m afraid. I also have a Flinders Uni one if that’s of any use (it’s a bit a warped, and I’m not sure whether it’s got any cash left on it).