Your article really spoke to me, especially since I'm on the shortlist for "Worst clutter created by one old person living alone, men's freestyle." This clutter includes not just my mother's supremely impractical Rosenthal plate and the wine glasses I bought my self for my 50th birthday - gorgeous Champagne flutes from the Czech Republic, etched with delicate leaves and vines - but the childish detritus on the floor. I am the child; the hard drives without a home and the empty boxes of unsolicited Nicorette and the scattered loose change (hey, I DO have enough for a pack of smokes!) are somehow the equivalent of loose coloring book pages and a stuffed huggy toy with one of its button eyes missing.

I hid the Champagne flutes so no one would use them but me - and I ended up breaking four of them. But that's part of the meditation on time and non-grasping. The Japanese, as always, have solved this in exquisite style. Kintsugi is the ancient art of mending broken vessels using a mixture of an adhesive and gold. The result is an object that's as strong as the original, and even more beautiful for the veins of gold running through it, the signs of age, of impermanence, and of healing.

DR