‘Every day’s a school day’ is one of Peter’s favourite sayings. He mostly uses it when trying to understand the many foibles of his computer, but to be honest you can use it in just about any area of life. Basically, you might be old, you might think you know it all and have seen it all, but the truth is you don’t and haven’t, and almost everyday there are new opportunities, some voluntary, some by force of circumstance, to learn more.

Not a bad thing in itself, but it can be frustrating and time consuming. It can also be very, very annoying, particularly when you’re re-learning a lesson you first learnt years ago. In other words, a situation when you should have known better.

I wrote a little while ago about a wardrobe we were buying from E Bay because we needed extra storage space. I  referred to it at the time as a behemoth, providing plenty of room for all our ‘stuff’.

The wardrobe was delivered on schedule on a rather damp Wednesday teatime. Peter and the courier began to unload it. It took them forever, I thought it would never stop. The large pieces went straight up stairs, the rest of the pieces were put in the hall. Remember the footstools?  You can see where this is going can’t you.

The sheer weight of each individual piece was incredible. I could see by the look on Peter’s face he was worried, though at the time I wasn’t quite sure why. It turned out he was worried about the ability of the bedroom floor to hold the weight of the assembled wardrobe full of all our clothes and clutter.

Well, that was it for me. I hadn’t been too keen as I watched it coming through the door, but the idea of it coming through the sitting room ceiling was just too much. As far as I was concerned it would have to go.

Over the next couple of days we discussed what options we had and even tried to fall back in love with it (it had looked stunning in the photo in the ad and was undoubtedly a superb piece of furniture) but we kept coming back to the weight issue, and in the end agreed that selling it on was the only sensible option.

We considered assembling it for the purpose of taking our own photos, but in the end we wimped out and just took pictures of the individual pieces. So back on E Bay it will go. We really should have known better.