My elder daughter has invited some kind of boyfriend to stay with us, so I thought I ought to make the effort — even though it wasn't due its 5-yearly rearrangement of dirt until 2010. It took me 2½ hours with the vacuum cleaner to get it done. It would have taken me longer, but I couldn't be faffed with taking down my stash of empty boxes to get the dust off them.
There was a lot of dust, but it was in places where I know it accumulates. The office acts like some kind of Sargasso Sea for air currents in the house: stuff comes in but it doesn't leave. It's mainly noticeable with the insects that my wife freely admits into the house on summer days, but dust comes this way too. That's my perfectly plausible scientific explanation, anyway.
Oh, there were sequins, too.
I even threw some things out. One was a perfectly serviceably flatbed scanner which I haven't used since I bought a printer that had a better one built into it. Some reference books for literary agencies went, which were useful prior to the invention of the Internet but are less useful now. I also had old dental appointment cards and raffle tickets from the RNIB Summer Draw 25 June 2004 (I don't think we won anything). I don't suppose I'll get around to using these international reply coupons now, either:
Each one is good for an international postage stamp...
Other things were found. I hadn't realised I'd done quite so much design work for a game idea I have set in mid-19th Century Europe, for example, which has reinspired me so much that I'd be working on it this afternoon if I weren't going on another grim trip to Newmarket to spend an hour listening to Eastenders blaring out of the TV while my wife and father-in-law try to talk to the version of my mother-in-law hidden beneath her dementia. I don't suppose I'll be in the mood when I get back.
All in all, I'm quite pleased with my work. If only I didn't know that this time next week it's going to look just as bad as it ever did.