Rich Pickings

Well, we did it.
We cracked open the Basement, and box by box, weird artefact by weird artefact, we excavated it. We found things we'd long-forgotten were down there, and put them, one by one, out on the wall of the house.

Now, of course, the point of doing something so generally bizarre is that round here, almost anything you put on your wall will be picked up and taken away by some other bugger at the first available opportunity. It's kinda like the Circle of Life, only with junk.

This morning though, we rather loaded up the wall - boxes of old magazines, a box the size of a seven-year-old of assorted teddybears, handbags and rucksacks from the beginnning of time, about a third of a part-work Lord of the Rings chess-set, shoes we don't fit, two yearsworth of film magazines, at least one knackered laptop, all sorts of stuff.

We kept delving down and pulling out more stuff, but this morning, we quickly became something of a local phenomenon. When I came up with a box of stuff of unparallelled dustiness, there was an old Chinese woman bundingling things into a car.
"Bags?" she said by way of introduction.
"Pardon?" I said.
"Bags? More bags?" she demanded, scowling.
"Ah..." I looked into the box.
"Well, yes, as it happens," I said, smiling.
She took the box out of my hands without a word.
"Oh," I said. "Right. Well, enjoy..." and I went back down to the Basement for more stuff.
The next time I emerged, she was still there, loading.
"Wardrobe?" she demanded.
"What?"
"You have wardrobe?"
"Oh...erm...no, no wardrobes. Sorry," I said, inexplicably. She sucked her teeth at me and turned away.

The next time I popped up into the sunlight, there was something of a dispute going on. At least, it had the character of a dispute - as it was being conducted in Chinese and some Eastern European language, I can't be entirely sure. My Chinese wardrobe-pirate was disputing the availability of some of the stock with a family of Eastern Europeans, who had apparently heard the news about the lunatics putting good stuff out on their wall in Stratford.
"Kids' toys!" I said, brandishing still-wrapped Christmas presents from years ago. "And a knackered laptop?"
The Dad from Eastern Europe shouldered the Chinese woman out of the way and took it all out of my hands.
"Pleasure, I'm sure," I muttered.

Next time, most of the stuff had vanished, and so had the Eastern Europeans. The Chinese Optimist had our bin open, and was examining the empty boxes inside.
"Hey!" she said, brandishing the empty box from a long-extinct kitchen mandolin. "I have one of these at home. It's good. You throwing it away?"
"Nono...just the box," I said.
"Hmmph..." she muttered, dropping the box in disgust at the affrontery of some people - not throwing out things she wanted, indeed!
I went back inside for a final time, and d declared that we were done with the excavation portion of the Basement. We stopped for lunch - pizza! - and now she's gone back to the Basement, from where the sound of miscellaneous box-taping is now competing with the over-excitable din of Dick Van Dyck being Caractacus Potts on my TV screen. And now I've finished telling you all this, I'm about to escape back to the depths myself, before Chitty Chitty Bang Bang emerges triumphant and people start singing again.

The Basement still calls, you know, as the countdown to Box Day appears to speed up. And what with the fact that I leave tomorrow for another conference and might have to consider tomorrow as this week's official weigh-in, I'm most officially not going to panic about the whole pizza I just had. After all, done quite a bit of shifting today so far, plus more to come and biking later. Not panicking. Just not, so nehh.

Something occurs to me. Wonder if our Chinese woman is still waiting outside for me to come back out with more stuff...