I dumped my bag on the bed and opened the wall cupboards, looking for somewhere to hang my few shirts. But the cupboards were piled high. Some of this was my mother’s clothing. The materials felt brittle to the touch, the clothes very old and rarely worn.

But there was still a relic of my own old stuff stored here. There were no clothes. No doubt they had all disappeared into the maw of charity, and my old T-shirts and trousers might even now be adorning some refugee child from flooded Bangladesh or parched Egypt; it was an age of refugees, plenty needing to be clothed. But there were computer games, books, and a few of my classier-looking models, such as the huge mobile of the International Space Station that had once hung over my bed, now neatly disassembled and stored in bubble wrap. Some toys had survived, mostly tie-in figurines and die-cast models, all carefully stored inside their boxes.

It was, to my eyes, an eclectic mix; parents sorting out their children’s middens are a random filter. It seemed my mother had selected objects not of sentimental value but that might be worth money someday: a toy survived the cull only so long as it was in good condition and if she could find its packaging. But those mint-condition auction candidates, of course, were precisely the toys I had spent the least time with. Still, her eye for value had been good. A lot of the computer games could have raised some cash; there was a whole industry of silicon-chip archaeology turning out readers for such things, gizmos several electronic generations old and yet still precious to sentimental old fools like me.

I did come across one chance fossil that had escaped the cull, despite having no discernible value. It was a small tin, slotted so it served as a money box.