The parable of the Irn Bru spray.

This is a story about simplification. My ex-wife is one of those people who hoards. She kept innumerable caches of worn-out or outgrown clothing, and angrily resisted any efforts to give them to charities. As I find time to clean various corners of this rather battered house that is, at least for now, home for our gentler and smaller family, I keep discovering new stashes of very old clothes.

There was one stash, though, that was out in plain sight: the Red Mending Rag Sack. I think it started life as the canvas cover to a beanie bag chair, but long ago it became a destination for irreparable items of clothing that, because of fabric or fasteners, were potentially useful as parts in restoring some other garment. It wound up in the dining room one day, when I was shifting furniture. Someone sat on it. It settled there, by the kitchen door, and never moved again. Being central, it became a wonderful method of disposing of Things That Deserved To Not Be Thrown Away - just open the flap and stuff them in, an act of mercy. Little by little, it grew and solidified. Of course we couldn't get rid of it--it was Useful and Worthy, and besides, people did sometimes sit on it when it wasn't piled high with other things. Years passed. It grew.

But a fortnight ago, the fridge went into death throes. Grumbling about how divorce is expensive because you only have half as much money and all the responsibilities, I ordered a fine new fridge. It would sit, as the old one had, just opposite the huge Red Mending Rag Sack. First, I had to clear out the old fridge and sort out the stuff stored on top -- some of it very old and mysterious. And when I went to clear out the very first items, the helpfully stacked tins and cartons of juice and such, a heroic tin of Irn Bru leapt from the very top of the stack, fell onto a child's trainer, and somehow ruptured.

The resulting spray fan of sticky orange soda cut a precise vertical line across the room. It hit the cooking aprons. It hit the doorframe. And it sliced into the venerable Red Mending Rag Sack with a penetrating edge of, well, Irn Bru. I tried to dodge while grabbing the cheerfully orange, beholed, tin to prevent further damage, but it caught me from bum to spectacles as I hurled it, still frothing, into the garden. After a round of choice expletives and some speculation as to whether my ex really had cursed us, I fetched soap and water to clean the wall, the carpet, the chair, more wall. The aprons went into the laundry. And the Red Mending Rag Sack sat there, smugly absorbent. There was no way to clean that. It Would Have To Go.

For the first time in years, I tried to shift it and discovered that it was actually rather heavy. We had crammed a remarkable amount of Things To Forget into that bag, and compressed rejection really does weigh a lot. With a combination if grunting, heaving, rolling, and canny tricks known only to older people making do, I got it out the back door and into the garden where it promptly sat looking Pointedly Abandoned.

The child who usually sat nearest the Red Mending Rag Sack was, to begin with, a bit upset. He'd become accustomed to leaning his chair back onto it. We considered options. The other children came into the discussion. Before the Red Sack, there had been the much loved Tatty Couch. What if I committed, as an enlightened parent who listened to their children, to putting a couch back there, once we could afford it? It was an acceptable solution.

So the next day I booked a car from the car club and took several bags of old children's clothes to Barnardo's. Then I fetched the wheelbarrow and braced it so that I could lever the Red Mending Rag Sack up, wheel it along, and half tip, half heave it into the boot. At the local recycling point I was told to lob it into a general skip for incineration -- fine by me! -- but awkwardly, though I used my best "lifting heavy object" technique, I simply couldn't hoist it high enough to get it over the edge. Fortunately for me there, a bloke with a very expensive pickup was flinging away hundreds of pounds worth of cycling accessories right next to me. I asked, and he helped hurl the thing into the skip.