I decided to start in the kitchen. Who knows what evil lurks at the back of the pantry, where sun never shines and eye rarely visits?

Among other things that make me blush for shame, I found an unopened container of Duncan Hines chocolate fudge icing. Its best-before date? You'll get a laugh out of this -- 11 September 2001.

My favourite piece of "what to eat" advice comes from that guy who wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma -- No, I can't remember his name just now. "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food, or anything that doesn't go bad." The stuff was actually palatable. Too palatable -- I could feel the transfats racing through my system, not to speak of the drop-dead idiocy of allowing myself to be alone in the house with such an attractive nuisance (in the legal sense of the phrase).

Heave-ho.

The margarine that Edmund eats and I don't went with it: by the time he gets back, it will have either gone bad or proven that it won't, and it is therefore condemned twice.

And who knew we had so many cat toys? None of them worth a snap, either; the moggies prefer fingers (chomp), wine corks (bat, pursue) and guitar picks (swat).