Amazing Things You Find in Drawers

My parents, who are arriving any moment now, are bringing with them a cedar chest of drawers that they rescued in a dire condition from an auction and which my father has spent months restoring.

So I’m stripping the hideous, black-laminate IKEA chest of drawers that has been the bane of my existence for years (I can, for example, only open three of the drawers).

But I had no idea I’d find such strange objects in a piece of furniture we use every day.

So far, I’ve found

1. A plastic pirate’s hook.

2. A fake, black-velvet bow tie.

3. My hairbrush, which went missing a couple of weeks ago.

4. A Christmas card from people I have barely spoken to in seven years.

5. The receipt for a Christmas present Nick bought me six years ago. Whoops.

6. My own body weight in scarves and shawls, including my father’s moth-eaten Liverpool University scarf.

7. A random piece of cardboard, which I think once surrounded the sari I’ve had hanging on my bedroom wall for six years—but I don’t know why this is in a drawer.

8. At least one T-shirt for every cult TV show that’s aired since 1992—plus multiple Doctor Who shirts and The Cure shirts: Nick has worn none of these for years.

9. A shopping list. I think I must have been making coleslaw, because it calls for red cabbage, capsicum, radishes, and parsley. (Well, technically, it calls for “radish” and “parsleys,” so I think Nick got his plural nouns confused.)

10. Organza bags that once held Easter eggs.

11. The bottom halves of a pair of trousers that Nick once had that zipped off at the knees: I don’t think he even has the trousers any more.

I’m sure there’d be more, but parents have arrived and I need to go and dismantle a 1960s’ sideboard.

Life in the suburbs, eh?