If not, I ask again, where does the cut-off point come?


We all own a few pieces of crap & scraps; they hardly define us or empower us in the same way as wealth, status, property & entire estates and the tied lives beholden thereto. This is why I find Left-Wing takes of Kipling's The Land so laughable. Old Hobden doesn't even own his own caricatured cliché of peasant servility to his feudal Lord & Master. My meagre bits & bobs will soon be gone - obsolete folkloric fodder to be picked over in the car boot sales of future days before ending up in the great landfill that was once our Green & Pleasant Land (Hob - what about that river-bit for filling in with crap?).

The other day my brother posted me a hat box which contains, he says, my recently deceased mother's few worldly trinkets. I think the most valuable things in there are likely to be her old Beatles singles, but it all meant the world to her. I doubt I'll ever open it though - it arrived on what would have been her 81st birthday and went straight in the back of a cupboard. Christ said set not your treasures on earth. As if we have any choice, eh? Our few crappy trinkets & gew-gaws are symbolic of a hope, souvenirs, echoes of meaning and memory, but entirely valueless in and of themselves. Like our car which we hang onto because although it's a good runner, we know it'll go straight for scrap. Same with this computer, or any of the 'property' I 'own'.

Capital binds us by the wasteful idiocy of built-in obsolescence. I guess there's your cut-off point right there, Michael.