Stilly, you will find lots of similarly scarred company in the locker room. The aquafit class I go to at the Stratford Y looks like an event for veterans of orthopaedic surgery.

Another trip to the dump today, this time with a load of clothing and household linen for the textile recycle bins.

Among the condemned items are Irish double-damask table napkins worn to holes and/or stained by hard water. Who still uses napkins that must be ironed? The fancy modern steam iron Edmund bought six months before he died has no setting for linen and doesn’t get hot enough. Another appliance that doesn’t do what I need done, dammit.

I kept four linen tablecloths, including a hand-embroidered one made by my grandmother and her sister sometime during the reign of Edward VII. Don’t know when I’ll ever use it again (it used to come out for Christmas), or where I would get it laundered in this day and age — it’s much too big for a domestic ironing board. But I’m not ready to part with it yet, or the lace-edged tray cloth that matches it. When did you last see a tea tray laid with a linen cloth? When I reel my memory back, I find myself in the mists of the 1950s with the rector on a pastoral visit.