On a couple of occasions, big slabs of my childhood and younger years were lost.

The worst loss was a chest of drawers full of treasured childhood objects that I had stored in my mother's garage while between houses. She and I often had disagreements - she was always very difficult to get along with. Whenever one of these things happened, she would react impulsively out of spite to try and hurt me.

On this occasion, she decided to sell everything in the garage for $1500, including all my grandmother's quite valuable furniture (one piece would have been worth that alone), and everything else in there, including my old chest of drawers and its contents, which would have had negligible monetary value.

I lived a couple of hours drive away, and the next time I visited, I found the garage was empty. She had not said a word to anybody - just done it. Everyone else in the family was shocked as well, because the furniture had sentimental value to us, and it was not really hers to sell - she was just minding it.

The chest of drawers contained all the childhood things I had put aside to keep - special dolls and teddy bears, special toys I had loved, a spiral bound cookbook with a Christmas cake recipe I have never come close to duplicating, books and mementos of all kinds that were quite irreplaceable - I can't even remember all that was in there - all gone. And yes, she knew what it was, and what was in it.

My brother in France still has a lot more of his stuff than I do, because he packed up and left Australia years earlier, taking everything with him. That was obviously a wise move on his part. I saw many of his old motoring magazines and model planes when I visited him in Paris one time.

It's not like I NEED any of these things to live, but it's a slice of my past cruelly snatched away, and if I think about it (which I only am now because of this thread) it still upsets me.

Another time, while I was in the process of moving house, and still had a car boot full of things - mainly photo albums - my car was stolen and not found for four weeks. During that time, the car had been stripped and exposed to the weather, and although I got the albums back, most of the photos had been ruined by rain. Another slice gone. Sometimes I think of a photo from my teenage years that I should have had, and realise that it was probably somewhere in the sticky mess of congealed cardboard and plastic that had to be thrown away.