W
hen scrubbing grease off your kitchen walls,
avoid damaging any priceless art that might
be under it. That’s a top tip we learned from
a news report about a family in Guatemala
who cleaned their kitchen and found priceless Mayan
frescos on the walls.
That true story was sent in by aggrieved reader Varsha
Puri, who said: “My uncle spends hours with a metal
detector looking for treasure, so it seems unfair that fat lazy
guys find stuff right there in their kitchen.”
Life is unfair. After an unpublished manuscript from
author Hans Christian Andersen was found down the back
of a sofa (another true story) I poked around in mine, to
find nothing more than a fossilised French fry, which one
of my kids tried to eat, arguing that it was “probably still
good”. The dog also wanted it, and I hope won the tug of
war that followed.
The report about the rediscovered Mayan art
resonated with me, as I have also been cleaning out stuff
because of moving house. We formed a chain to pass
cardboard boxes to the removal guys. But after 30 boxes,
I noticed that the next batch of cartons had a different
removal company brand name: boxes that had remained
unopened since our previous house move!
Even more eyebrow-raising was the fact that the
remaining boxes bore still other company names: cartons
unopened from the move before the move before the move
before the move before, etc. Some of the boxes looked older
than me. They may be ancient Mayan cardboard boxes.
That night, I was at the bar talking about ancient junk
when the guy next to me told me about a North Carolina
woman who found a guy she had broken up with 12 years
earlier living in her attic. He showed me the report, which
said: “She does not know how long the man had been
staying there.” OK, now that made me really nervous
about cleaning out old storerooms.
On the other hand, re-examining your furniture can
be a time of discovery.
Hong Kong electronics manufacturer Karuna Menon
was in a friend’s living room when he got the urge to stick
Moving stories
Sofa cracks are portals to alternative universes,
warns father-of-three
Nury Vittachi
.
his hands into the depths of the sofa on which he sat. (I’m
never inviting him to my house.) He found jewellery down
there: real gold and diamonds.
Sofas can be portals to parallel universes, according
to the internet, which reports on a huge range of unlikely
objects found inside them, from cats to crocodiles.
I’ve got a news cutting from a few years ago when a
UK teenager named Rebecca Wells found a chocolate
bar down the back of her sofa. She was tempted to put
it straight into her mouth, but then changed her mind.
Good thing, too. It turned out to be a Cadbury’s Wispa,
a discontinued line of chocolate bar that had been wildly
popular in the 1980s. She ended up selling it to expired
foods collectors (yes, they exist) on eBay for £1,000, which
is like $13,000.
On the other hand, re-
examining your furniture
can be a time of discovery.
Last year, staff at a Christian charity shop in
Hertfordshire, UK, found £9,000 in one, and returned
the lot to its owner. The man, who had forgotten about the
cash, donated a mere £500 to the charity, the meanie.
What is the biggest thing that has disappeared down
the back of the sofa? I’m not sure, but I had a weird great-
uncle who was last seen 20 years ago on a black leatherette
three-seater before vanishing for ever. People said that
he was so shocked by meeting his family that he fled and
changed his name, but I prefer the more scientific theory
that he fell down the back of the sofa and is now probably
in a parallel universe.
If you reach down the back of your sofa and pull him
out, get straight on to the phone. Call anyone but me.
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