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Everything we once thought essential is now obsolete. In twenty-five years we’ve been through VHS, Zip Disks, CD-ROM, DVD, DVD writers, MiniDisks, thumb drives, Palm Pilots, desktop towers. All of them now discarded, making their final trip to e-waste mountain, to be picked over for fragments of precious metal, or else thrown into landfill to be picked over by archeologists in a far off distant epoch.

All those boxes carefully persevered just in case, now find themselves brutally flattened, the owner now reconciling himself to reality: that this once essential tech is now completely worthless. No museum or charity shop will ever embrace this tat.

It’s painful to discover what a squanderful generation we have been, charging forward to embrace every innovation, averting our eyes from the heaps of waste left in our wake. Unfortunately, it’s all there is that shed, as all that has been cast aside ends up in purple rubbish bags. Toys, books, old clothes, boxes, cassettes, bits of wood, wires and all the rest.

I feel guilty doing this job today. The only certainty: whatever we take to the tip this afternoon, we will definitely need next Thursday.