There’s a lid for every pot

I have come to the conclusion that you can find a new home for absolutely anything that you no longer need or love. Someone, somewhere will gladly take it off your hands. Maybe there is enough stuff in the world already and all we need to do is keep handing it on to each other like a giant game of pass the parcel. No longer have any use for your glow-in-the-dark Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? Someone round the corner would cherish it. Lena Zavaroni’s greatest hits on vinyl? There’s a nostalgic Scotsman somewhere who is anxious to take it off your hands.

I think I have mentioned my unfortunate wedding dress before. I had one of those billowy, marshmallowy confections that were so popular in the 1980s. Anyone over 60 will remember that those dresses made the unfortunate bride look as though she were concealing a giant toilet roll underneath. Not satisfied that I had committed enough crimes against good taste, I decided to preserve it in a box with a plastic window, making it look like an open coffin with a stuffed, headless wedding dress inside. Tim Burton would have approved. Surprisingly, my daughter had no interest in wearing it when she got married. Unsurprisingly, I was desperate to get rid of it. It had haunted me for far too long, so I contacted our local amateur dramatics society and somehow convinced them that they needed it. I pointed out that it would be the perfect dress for a princess – they agreed and whisked it away, out of my sight. I was very glad to see the back of it, but am tempted to go to the local pantomime next year just to see if Cinderella appears in my wedding dress.

The list of things we’ve given away using Freecycle, Freegle and our local Facebook community group is a long one. We’ve inflicted plant stands, icing bags, cables, airline goodie bags, baking parchment, laptops, speakers and countless other things on our local community, but I have one particularly satisfying re-homing story.

After we had moved house for the second time in three months, we discovered that our big ceramic casserole dish had not survived the trauma and now had a large hole in the bottom. It was a Royal Worcester pattern that was once popular, but discontinued long ago. The lid was undamaged and I was convinced that there would be someone who had broken their own lid and was desperately looking for a replacement. I contacted China Search, who said they had no use for it, and then I remembered that a friend of mine had the very same casserole dish. I messaged her just before Christmas to see if by some remote chance she had broken the lid and needed another. Amazingly, she had and was delighted when I offered her an early Christmas present. She came over yesterday (I’m hoping it was to see me as well as the lid) and went off happily clutching her prize. I tried to make her take some baking parchment too, but she was having none of it.