It is, or was, traditional in British culture to dress – oneself, and one’s children – in good plain underwear from Marks and Spencer on the basis of being “decent” if one was run over by a bus and taken to the hospital/the morgue. One would have been mortified to be caught dead wearing dirty, trashy or otherwise embarrassing undies.
Now I think that tradition is more or less a thing of the past, at least to judge by M&S’s dismal sales records of recent years, and by the amount of implausible to-die-in stuff that one sees on the average British High Street these days. (I stress that I mean see in the windows of shops that would have been too risqué to exist on the aforementioned British High Street a few years ago). Red thongs. Any thongs. Utterly inappropriate.
Anyway, my worry is completely different.
If I fall under a bus, someone is going to have to sort out my crap.

Luckily this image isn’t high-res enough to be quite as scary as it should be, but I don’t think my executors will enjoy it. There is a lot of glass crap (stuff to photograph for Etsy, but I get frustrated at how hard that is), a lot of knitting crap, some broken-by-kid crap, rescued-from-kid crap, and hidden-from-kid crap, as well as a hell of a lot of standard desk crap. Mary, I salute you. I was only ever jealous.
Also, unsurprisingly (and actually perfectly appropriately), on my desk is my computer (which I love). Inside my computer is – yes – a lot of byte-crap and pixel-crap. Somewhere in its insides are a million emails (you know how the FBI stores email? Well, they are not alone. I am apparently constitutionally incapable of deliberately getting rid of an email. Every few years computer-death/-flu/-tsunami etc wipes me out, but I get wilier at storing them and – heaven preserve me – I have been known to restore them all.)
I can’t believe I just admitted that.
There are now also a frightening number of photos of yarn. I do not, like some people, photograph my stash (which is another thing I don’t really want the executors finding having to go through, now I think of it) and list it on Ravelry. I am too busy wasting time in other ways to contemplate doing a thing like that, but in addition to the occasional eye candy fo this blog, I now have to photograph my own yarn for the Midnight Sheep Etsy shop. It turns out that while it’s easier – by far – than glass, it still takes a fair few tries to get the required glamor shot. And no, although I intend to, I don’t then go back to my image files and weed out all the ones I no longer need.
To my executors: my best advice is the oldest of them all – burn the papers, or in modern terms, take a hatchet to the hard drive. A magnet might also do the trick. And, I apologize. But I will try to be wearing clean underwear, if that still counts.
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