Unfortunately, in the house, the basket lodges on the fridge/telly sports zombie trail, which is how come it was drenched with wine and spent the night on the porch drying out.
Subsequently, everything which has clustered in the depths without ever disembarking at either intended destination was tipped out into crisp winter sunlight, for the first time in decades.
Submerged were no fewer than seven pairs of scissors - long-lost, heirloom wallpaper giants, sharp haircutters and tiny curved ones from a women's manicure set - and even a handy pair of artery forceps bequeathed aeons ago by a then-young doctor whose first stint in bone surgery convinced her to pursue psychiatry.
Seven pencils too - five HBs of varying quality, an excellent 2B and the stub of a rare gold Travelfar, the acme of pencils, issued by a long-defunct 1970s South Island bus company back when giveaway pencils were hot advertising gimmicks. Travelfar drawings always endure, just as the pencils have in space and time.
Thirteen pens included three felts, one highlighter, a propelling pencil in the wrong category, three horrible blue ballpoints, two black calligraphers, and two fine-tipped black ballpoints, excellent for drawing (though not archivally sound) and fast becoming an endangered species barely obtainable in stationery outlets.
The list goes on - an elegant mini (size 4) ball-peen hammer, (a $12, second-hand tool shop bargain), screwdrivers, dodgy pliers, a brilliant paint scraper, ball bearings, occlupanids (plastic bread bag fasteners - from the Latin for close and bread - also handy reserve guitar picks), a cupful of nails, screws, screw-eyes and washers, sandpaper scraps, dubious batteries, a terrorist box-cutter, a slice of inner-tube rubber, assorted cordage, half a walnut shell on its way to becoming a toy boat and four polystyrene cubes for jamming the lawnmower throttle open since the cable broke.
I could go on - clothes-pegs, redundant coins, sodden notes to self, toothpicks, a wet 2001 bus-ticket, broken reading glasses and a fine selection of small pieces of wood for touching superstitiously should the need arise, which frequently it does ...
Quickly dispatched from very bottom were ants, hopefully late arrivals attracted overnight by the wine. Perhaps the next difficulty, of finding appropriate homes for these treasures, explains how the term "too-hard basket" originated?
