Weird things in cupboards

Huge excitement as I have finally bought a breadmaking machine. It's got all kinds of extras like a timer and everything, and a drawer for adding nuts and raisins so that it automatically opens and throws the stuff into the dough at just the right moment. Actually it's really sad to use the terms huge excitement and breadmaker in the same sentence but there you are, that's getting old for you.

Anyway the shiny machine provoked a trip into Sainsbury's to stock up on bread flour and yeast and stuff, which we did with gusto. Walnuts and dates, seeds and special bread mixes, we hauled a load home. Which meant that today I had to climb up to sort out the contents of the cupboard and Make Room for the new stuff.

Now the top cupboard is a bit of a forgotten land as climbing on chairs is a bit forbidden to me what with a bad leg and osteoporosis and all. But I do occasionally foray into the cupboard realm and what strange things I find there:

- boxes of cup -o' -soup . The thing with cup o soup is - why? It's vile and there's no need for it, chemicals in a cup. All of ours was very out of date so i threw it away, just like that.
- food colouring. Just as in my mum's store cupboard, so in mine. Lots of it. Legacy from children's birthday cakes I reckon.
- bicarbonate of soda, baking powder and cream of tartar. I've never been too sure what these unholy trio does for you, and they were 4 years out of date with approx 0.5 teaspoons removed from each pack. Reader, I threw them away.
- empty, completely empty boxes. I blame Poppy for this one.
- rank old remains of oats, dried fruit, skanky sachets of sugar etc - it's like there's a world crisis and we've hung onto these as a protection against the emergency. Except there isn't one.

When I was about 6 my mum bought me a cake with a sugar Humpty Dumpty on it. I kept the HD in a tin for years in the pantry - years and years - I used to take it out and look at it every now and then, and then put it back. It had special significance as Firkin's the bakers had a whole window of cakes that I used to look at every Friday when I went shopping, with a kind of acquisitive envy. My mum used to make us lovely cakes but of course the shop bought ones were always better in my eyes, so she eventually bought one from Firkin's for me. I did have years of pleasure from the HD though of course I never even nibbled on him. So he stayed in the cupboard and then probably got thrown away in a mad purge one day.

Anyway i could go on but you get the picture. And i couldn't reach into the furthest corner so there's probably some other unmentionable horrors lurking therein. My point is really that I expect everyone has a similar list of nasty things in their cupboards and why do we keep them? some sort of native hoarding gene in case we fall on hard times?

Next week - watching paint dry.