I live alone, and to afford this relative luxury I live in fairly small quarters. Space is at a premium, and storage space at an even greater premium. Now I certainly don’t purport to be the tidiest soul in the universe. No sir. I can clean and tidy when I need to, but I also spend a fairly sizeable chunk of the time (being as it is that I live alone) wallowing in my own filth.

Now if I had a family to clean up after, kids and the like, well… it doesn’t bear thinking about, just the thought of it makes me tired.

So… to the matter of storage space… I have a wardrobe… I have a chest of drawers… I have about a million items of clothing (of which I probably regularly wear about 2%) and something here just doesn’t add up. Now you understand why my studio can be, quite frankly, a tip. What happens is that my floor space becomes not so much ‘space’ but in fact takes on a new role – that of a ‘Floordrobe’ a temporary wrangling area for those clothes worn once, maybe even just for a matter of minutes or seconds, scrutinised in the mirror and discarded perfectly clean (at least for the time being) on the floor until such time as I am hit by a madness of cleaning frenzy, or they get absorbed back into the cycle and worn again passing the test they previously failed by being teamed with something that works, or until the weather becomes either a) too hot, or b) too cold (more likely) that I don’t care what I am wearing.

Useful item, the Floordrobe, doesn’t come flat packed, no assembly required, takes up very little space until full, and always matches the carpet.
Oh wait… it is the carpet.

It’s funny how an entire nation (albeit a funny little island nation almost at the end of the world) can have a secret word that no one else seems to know about, but which is taken as completely normal and which never even crosses the mind of the people that it is infact a conjoinulation.

It’s only with four years of distance and hindsight that I come to realise how cute and dorky the word ‘Pottle’ is.
In my homeland, you buy a pottle of yoghurt for school lunches. You may even buy a pottle of margarine, and you might even find yourself buying a pottle of strawberries at some point (although possibly more correctly, a punnet - not sure, may have slightly forgotten how to speak my native kiwi).

OK, so officially, ‘pottle’ may -MAY- have nothing to do with what you get when you cross a pot and a bottle, and may have even been a type of official measurement:

‘An old English liquid measure equal to 2.0 quarts (1.9 liters).’
(So they say...)

...but I like to think of it more as a type of ‘reverse conjoinulation’, or ‘unjoinulation’, whereby when new types of different sized storage vessels came into use they unjoinulated the word ‘pottle’ and thus created 2 new things to stick stuff in: the ‘pot’ and the ‘bottle’.