We don’t have what the Americans call a junk drawer. Actually, we even have fewer drawers than my mother has in her kitchen. We have four drawers which have, approximately, the following:

• The most commonly used table cutlery plus some kitchen tools
• Some more kitchen tools
• The herbs and spices (in a shallow drawer is the only way to do this and the nice people at Schwartz are now putting labels on the top of the jars so win all round
• the aprons, trays and a very nice aperitif dish set I picked up in France about 10 years ago. It has lighthouses on it.

The net result is that batteries are distributed around the house as are more batteries. Yesterday I found the string in the bottom of a bag that contains about 100 blank recordable CDs or DVDs. With some 3.25″ floppy disks. I don’t have much call for thread.

Some time ago, I decided that this wasn’t an ideal state of affairs, having not been able to find the spare batteries for the remote control again, and invested in one of those organising boxes. I had one for jewellery making stuff already but about 1000 American organising blogs talked about these boxes like they were the second coming of Christ. They recommended a particular one with adjustable walls on the interior which I could not get here.

I’m familiar with these boxes. Mostly in my life they have had screws in them. I grew up in a mechanic’s household. Anyway, I bought one at one of my local sources which was either Woodies, Home Store and More or some craft shop or other. Who knows, and into it I fed the useful things that most people put in junk drawers like the spare batteries from the remotes, the spare batteries for the kitchen timers, the spare USB cable for the camera or whatever else you want to plug into the computer. It was put safely and since then, I have had no difficulty finding batteries as required. Such as this morning when one of the timers became really illegible. I need to buy a couple of replacements for that but I digress.

At some stage on Friday night, one of the pictures in my own room fell down. I have no idea, and it must have gone down with a clatter because at least one of the pieces of art equipment under it has been broken. The pictures hang on 3M command strips and the picture in question is a large canvas of the sea off the Old Head of Kinsale with many stunning shades of blue. I love it, probably because it reminds me that however long I’ve been in Dublin, there is life outside the M50 and it is generally far more beautiful. I slept through the crash and wallop less than a metre from my head which, in one respect, is a bit sobering. Dripping taps wake me, as do the student parties 400m away on the other side of the estate.

So, I was reasonably sure I still had a few command strips * somewhere * but the logical place for them, the jewellery cum craft cum whatever you’re having yourself was completely devoid of them. I gritted my teeth and went to Tesco to get some. They had a variety which frankly looked a bit like Velcro but I risked it, got them home and discovered I had picked up that part of the range which was, in fact, a bit like Velcro, but not Velcro (probably because this wasn’t really Velcro, just a bit like Velcro but not like it at all). Either way, it wasn’t two sided sticky so…yeah. Bit of a problem there.

Today then, I went to Woodies, and stood, as you do, completely rumbled by the vast choice of Command strip products, frantically looking for spare strips like the one that was on the hook of the picture that fell down, gritted my teeth and bought a new set of hooks on the grounds that – and this pains me because it’s rarely true – they’d always be useful. I got some hooks for the inside of the wardrobe as well to hold things like those canvas bags we all have loads of now but can never find because they don’t have a home.

And rehung the picture, probably slightly at a different height, did the inside wardrobe hook, hung the bags and hoped none of them would fall.

Later, I decided that actually, the place mats that usually live with the stuff in the bottom drawer could possibly come out, and maybe the trays could do with being organised, discovered the aperitif dishes and idly wondered whether there was some other prettier use they could be put to.

And found 6 Command hooks with a dozen spare strips that would have saved me 16E in Woodies this morning if I had realised that in fact, although I thought I didn’t have a junk drawer, I did.