My mum threw me away
I still don't know why...
( Gerbilinafishtank Gerbil in a fish tank...TURTLE POWER!, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 23:01, Reply)

Is there such a thing
as bad porn?
( calibrax loves teh hamsters (not in that way), Thu 14 Aug 2008, 22:43, 12 replies)

Barcode Battler
I still can't believe she threw it out! I was young when I got it and didn't really have a clue what I was doing on the thing but just loved nicking barcodes from different items around the house.
( Hainesey, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 22:33, 1 reply)

my dog
yes that's right my mum threw my dog away.

when i was 16 i had a terrier that used to completely ignore everyone but me, so i'd often hear my mum screaming at it to stop chewing up the washing and other things like that. of course the dog wouldn't listen.

i used to be the one to take it out, clean up after it and feed it.well when i was in the middle of GCSE study leave and working hard (sleeping in as long as possible) my mum offered to take the dog out for me and look after him. she kept this up for about a month. i started to wonder where the dog was and she'd just tell me he was tired from the walk and asleep.

so one day i was going to meet up with a few mates and decided to bring him along. i went out to the shed and shouted him but he didn't come out. i just assumed he was asleep because it was dark in the shed so you couldn't really see much. after a week of him not coming out i wondered if there was something wrong.

i told my mum i thought there was something wrong with the dog. she laughed and said "what dog? we took him to the cat and dog a month ago"

she threw my dog away.

.
(i eat crayons, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 22:21, 2 replies)

Throwing stuff out
Recently had the task of helping clear out my mate's house after he died.

The task of disposing the pron fell onto myself and was detailed here:

thefuzzyspot.blogspot.com/

I know it's not technically an answer to the qotw but it was his funeral yesterday :(
(Heyzeus, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 22:21, 8 replies)

Thunderbird 3
One that was roughly my height when I was 7, bought by a well-off uncle as I had severely broken my arm, and my name has attachments to that particular vehicle. I loved it to death, and treasured it, till I came home one day to find pisshead father had sold it as "we were skint"- this whilst he was rolling pissed. Still ate crap for tea that night, and it still hurts. I have no idea of the value of it, but the emotional value was priceless. Bastard.
( Duke Of Belmsford has got 99 records, but Jay-Z ain't one, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 22:20, 1 reply)

2 years of animation
Many many years ago, after getting a fine degree in a sensible subject from a fairly old uni, i decided to stick it to the man, rebel against the olds, give up the job and the trendy flat in Edinburgh and go to a piss pot college in a one horse town (and the horse was dead) and study animation - the great and abiding love of my life.

Why a shitty little college instead of a shiny nice BA at art school. Couldn't be arsed with another 4 years of chiselling someone elses beanfeast off my plates in a hall of residence kitchen. I digress

It was the first year they'd done the course and they didn't have a clue. It wasn't until a year in that they even attempted a walk cycle which in the end they asked me to teach everyone. I desperately wanted to do stop motion and they had promised me the wherewithall and the software, in truth they gave me a cupboard and a spotlight and i somehow managed to cobble something together. We were running maya on our fisher price PCs, rendering scenes overnight. Those of us with real talent banded together to share our skills, coz the tutors had feck all. This was in 2002 and you would expect that we could somehow burn our work to disc and take it home to work on it. Nope, they gave us HD floppies FFS. Which none of us had a reader for at home. At the end of the year we had eye wateringly massive files at college of all our 3D, 2D and in my case stop motion work that we'd done. We all passed the course - not fucking surprised as we were self taught - and we were all looking forward to our promised CD Rom of work to take to our prospective employers at the end of the year.

But they wiped it all, overnight, because it was taking up too much room on their servers. All of it. Every last little walk cycle, lip sync, music video, wire frame, beautifully realised grey clay angel with silk and metal wire wings crying tears of glycerine over the body of a dead clay soldier in a stop motion version of Dulce Et Decorum Est.

I work in PR now, never did get that Animation job, Craig, one of the most talented 3D modellers i've ever seen drives a JCB on a building site, Colin, a naturally gifted 2D animator had a nervous breakdown.

not funny, not cool, but true
( Animanga, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 22:14, 4 replies)

Star Wars Comics Gone FOrever
I, like many here I imagine, was and still am a bit of a Star Wars fan. I grew up in the late seventies when it was cool to take a party to the cinema to see the first film for your birthday. I saw it 17 times at the cinema

And had all the figures etc and also every issue of the comic, from issue 1 which I kept in the top of my cupboard in my bedroom

Then I went to university, moved out etc, and one day thought "hey I've got all those nice well kept comics from 20 odd years ago, bet they're worth a few quid"

But they were gone!! Victim of a clean out while I had been away. Ironically the rucksack full of porn was still there, but not really worth very much
(twink, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 22:12, Reply)

Stating the obvious...
But the reason things like Star Wars toys are worth so much is because there's not enough supply to meet the demand.
If everybody's collection had survived intact then their value would be somewhere in the region of fuck all.

Incidentally, I've made every single one of my family aware that if I ever catch one of those "De-clutter your life" harpies anywhere near my flat I will attack on sight. I like clutter.
(Big D, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 21:54, Reply)

hurt
this is genuinely a really sore point for me. i used to have a huge collection of Buster comics: my first introduction to (very) mildly naughty content, comic strips and my first ever 2-D crush, Faceache...i was away for, like, a week one summer and when i came back my mum had binned the lot

i don't imagine they'd be worth a fortune but good grief i'd love to still have them.

also, about five years before THAT, she 'tidied' my room and threw out my pussy-willow collection. I cried so much i nearly made myself sick
(nck-nck, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 21:52, 1 reply)

Help a guy out...
I know I get zero for this, but hopefully someone knows this...

I had a Swank magazine from 1996, in it was the sweetest blonde I ever did see. The name written there was Stephanie. which is obviously fake.

My good mum found it and promptly chucked it, but to be honest, wanking hasn't been the same since. Its like the best spunk fantasy was removed from my possession and discarded like complete filth. Oh the ruin...

Now I'm listening to the Eagles (I can't tell you why. You know the song) and feeling sorry for myself dreaming of the days when I stared into her eyes, beating off furiously. We were meant to be together.

but she's gone.
I have tried to satisfy myself by sleeping with hundreds of women, but it always reminds me of the times alone in my room, just her and I, some lube and my hand.

Stephanie if you're out there, I'm sorry my mum thought you were smut. I'm sorry she turfed you like that. Most of all I'm sorry for the time I lent you to my mates. I know you weren't like that, I know you only wanted me. I miss you.

and the way you spread em.

*Sob*
(Bluffboy South Africa! World Champions!!!, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 21:42, 1 reply)

Oh, where to begin? My mother only throws out things she ought to keep.
All my old Barbies, my Star Wars figures, most of my toys in fact, and she did it when I was in my early 20s under the reasoning that 'you don't need them any more!'. Yes, but other people do and would be willing to pay big amounts of money for them!
Serves me right for asking to store them in her climate-controlled attic in the first place.

She did keep almost all my old clothes in case I had kids, so that means there's a tiny, tiny chance my old Doctor Who t-shirt is in there somewhere. Probably wouldn't fit over my head these days. . .not that it will keep me from trying, mind.
(louveciennes , Volvospotter, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 21:38, Reply)

mothers
as a little girl i had a freakish obsession collecting my little ponys and care bears
had pretty much the full set give or take a couple

fast forward til i was 17 and moved house, my mother decided to throw them out

would have sold for a fortune on ebay these days
(poppy_pop, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 21:19, Reply)

ACTION HITS TAPE: GONE!
When I was a wee lad I was given a walkman for my birthday. This was the early 80s so walkmans were fucking trendy back then - it was the size and weight of a housebrick but I was dead chuffed with it.

To go with this present was an even ACER present: A tape full of theme songs called Action Hits!! The A-Team, Bond Theme, Starsky & Hutch, The Professionals, Hawaii 5-0, Bergerac, Knightrider, Dukes of Hazard etc... fucking brilliant!! I was a very happy child, spending the summer of '86 climbing through a plasic tunnel with the T-J Hooker theme in my ears!

About a year later, I still enjoyed the tape often, but played on a large Sashio tape player hand me down from my sister. But occasionally the tape would find it's way into my old walkman for a cheeky midnight listen to The Equalizer.

However I must have left the tape in the walkman because mum took it and sold the old walkman it a Church Jumble Sale - complete with my beloved Action Hits :o( I was a broken child when I realised what had happened :o(

The worst part? She attemped to palm me off with "TV Sporting Hits" tape as a replacement!

I couldn't play "army" listening the the bloody theme to Grandstand :o(

Length? C90
( h3donist tryin' to play me out as if my name is Sega.., Thu 14 Aug 2008, 21:18, 1 reply)

Revenge Is coming I just have to be patient.


When I was a young Goldfish I had a rather large collection of He-Men figures* including Castle Greyskull and Snake Mountain as well.

I was a happy Goldfish until we moved house and I was made to give my collection away because we didn't have room.

My mum goes through bizarre phases where she reverts to childhood, one of her most recent purchases is a dolls house and she is currently collecting dolls/furniture and crap to go in said dolls house.

When it comes the time for her to be shipped off to the nursing home guess whats going to happen?

*Did anyone have the lizard which squirted venom(water) when you pressed It's head?
(DryGoldfish, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 21:11, 3 replies)

I had a beautiful
old hardcover 35mm photography book. When I had learnt everything I could from it, I gave it away to my cousin, who promptly got offered $1000 for it. Apparently, it was vintage and in mint condition. Did I get anything out of it, did I fuck!

My cousin never actually sold it, but still...
(Bel Shamharoth has eight of everything, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 21:09, Reply)

Nintendo
My Mother gave away one of my most prized possessions - my original Nintendo, the first console I ever owned and the first Game I ever played(The Turtles). This was when I was ten. This machine sent me on my way to what I wanted to do with my life,(Currently Studying Games Development in Uni)

She Gave it away, FOR FREE, to some school for Down Syndrome Kids ya I should be so pleased to help the disabled but the fuckers probably broke it within weeks

*cries*
(Lukekull Fuck, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 21:01, 3 replies)

About £10,000 worth of Star Wars toys...
... at a car boot sale way back when Star Wars was not cool, Transformers had been and gone and Thundercats had seen off He-Man as the toy of choice.

As I recall I bought a ThunderTank with the £40 the collectable plastic bastards earnt me at the time.

It was my Mum's idea.

Mum is dead.
(Error 404 - Username Unknown, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 20:59, Reply)

My 1st to 130th edition of "Transformers"
Me mam wanted me to have some kind of hobbie when I was a nipper and Transformers was the in-thing at the time. I bought every copy of it since release and saved up literally a pound a week to get a toy from Tescos once every 2 months. Slowly the collection grew until the fad was replaced by those bastard "Ninja Turtles". Me mam decided to generate some cash towards a computer that I wanted by selling the redundant toy collection through the local post. I did get a Spectrum +2A that Xmas, but I lost out on a goldmine.

About 6 months ago I was walking around the Marina in Swansea and the local museum had a comic history collection. Sitting there on the stand was a 1st edition of Transformers. It's most probably worth a fecking fortune now, could've done with the greens too :p

Damn fine read though at the time, found them on a website 2 years ago and read them all in a week.

PS What did Optimus say to the fatty? "Let's roll out" :D
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 20:57, Reply)

Bindun?
My virginity ... bastard vicar!
(Biff..., Thu 14 Aug 2008, 20:30, Reply)

free textbooks !
A few years back me and my mate were doing summer work whist at university. We were painter decorators for letting agency that mainly let out to students. In the middle of the detritus of a quite badly trashed house my mate found some mint condition textbooks.

They cost over £30 each and they would be required reading for my mates course next semester.

what course was he on ?

Economics.
( willenium Fist bump for verification, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 20:24, Reply)

My mum's doll
My mammy has this creepy, horrible doll that she was given as a child. It's ceramic, about two feet in length with staring glassy eyes, eerily realistic blond hair, one of those little bitey-teethy mouths, and is pure evil in a blue satin dress. She was never allowed to play with it as a child - it always had to be kept in its plain brown cardboard box that resembles nothing less than a possessed dolly's coffin.

My mammy threw out my childhood toys, and yet the Daughter of Chucky remains tucked away at the back of her wardrobe. At least, I hope it's at the back of the wardrobe. I would be unsurprised yet very, very frightened to learn that it's Not Where It's Supposed To Be.

My revenge is twofold:
1) put mammy in a home when she's too old to fight back;
2) throw that china carcass of Satan in the firey pits of Mordor.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 20:22, 2 replies)

my dad expressed his gratitude to a family friend recently...
by giving him MY 2 bottles of 1996 Fixin "Cuvee Napoleon" that had been lying carefully in his cellar since i bought them from the producteur in 1998. i was saving them for my 50th birthday which would have made the wine 22 years old. i had it on VERY good authority that this awfully good burgundy would have been just about perfect by then, 1996 having been one of the very best years of the last century.

i haven't even bothered checking out how much it would cost to replace, it was well over £30 per bottle from the producer 10 years ago.

Grrrrrrrr!
( blaireau69 , the Cumbrian Travis Bickle., Thu 14 Aug 2008, 20:15, 7 replies)

Army Brats
For those of you like me who have parents that served in the armed forces, you know all too well that the children make many sacrifices.

You move schools every 3 years having your education fucked about with as well as having to make new friends from scratch. Or alternatively you might have to be sent away to boarding school like my sister - she was never right in the head after coming back from Lincolnshire (sorry b3th, love ya really).

You have no answer to the straightforward question, "Where are you from?" / "Where did you grow up?".

But the biggest sacrifice of all is that because the family unit is constantly moving you have to diligently ensure that your treasured childhood possessions are actually packed into boxes and move with you rather than let some lazy parenting allow an impromptu clear out of "some rubbish they never play with anymore".

I don't mind that I no longer have any Lego bricks, or that my Transformers - infinitely superior to today's pile of crap - are no more. No, I miss my collection of not-at-all homo-erotic, body builders in tiny pants aka He-Man action figures.

Yes I'm sure you're right, if I did have those He-Man toys I'd probably play with them for a few minutes (remember the weird microphone that came with Snake Mountain?) before bunging the whole lot on eBay. The one item that I know I'd still get use of though is my He-Man duvet set. I still get bitter watching Father Ted as I'm filled with envious rage at Dougal and his He-Man duvet exactly the same as mine once was.

Curse you mum, curse thine evil throwing away hands!
( djtrialprice, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 19:59, 2 replies)

When I came home from Uni last Christmas
After having been away for only one semester, I found that my mum had given my BMX to the charity shop! Just given it away! (it was quite a good one too)

:(
(biggiantmat, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 19:57, 1 reply)

I've been clearing out the loft this week so I can tell how what I have as opposed to what I have lost:
An enormous collection of Empire magazines.

Fear magazines :)

FHM's before they turned into soft porn mags.

Mens Health magazines. I truly am not gay.

ForteanTimes magazines (major woo!)

A full collection of Input magazines complete with binders. (double major woo!)

And I'm a bit tired now, more later.
( Monty Propps, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 19:57, 2 replies)

I had this baby once...
And some bath water.

Keepin' it brief.

Mullered.
( JeffTheDogFucker Can you dig it?, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 19:52, 1 reply)

My Sega Genesis.
My first console. I got it for Christmas at age 5 or 6 (Almost 19 now - yes, I'm a youngun). I was proud of it, for at that age I wanted to be just like my older brother who played video games and went to big kid school and watched The Simpsons. I loved it dearly even though I was terrible at it (as all girls are, apparently).

One day I came home from school to see my precious Genesis missing from its spot next to my tiny television. I asked my mother where it had gone, and she informed me that she threw it out "because it was dirty." What the hell? How could my mother be so stupid? I cried for an hour and I still mourn to this day. I'm glad I had it for that short time though, because it instilled in me a love of gaming, and now I'm wasting my life for hours each day playing Team Fortress 2.
( trintrin has jam for blood, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 19:51, 7 replies)

Willenium's story reminds me
of my family, my family being my mum. A hoarder from a line of hoarders - she'd been born during the war in an East End slum and had grown up with rationing. Once it was all over nobody told them to act differently. My grandmother still has very neatly folded paper bags in a drawer from the eighties, along with the ubiquitous boxes of assorted buttons and bobbins, skeins the thread and napkins. She was the queen of hoarding, in that she hoarded neatly, kept everything spotless and knew where it all was.

One generation down, and it seems my mother had not honed the skills of the ordered hoard. When I grew up, the room my mum used as a study was literally three foot deep in papers (the room btw, was the size of a living room, so this was a not inconsiderable achievement) and there was only a small path from the door to the swivel chair in front of her computer, itself threatened by the papers the loomed around it. When the time came to move house - we were living on murder mile in a house we couldn't afford - the papers did get thrown away, and suddenly in the middle of the room a beautiful round table emerged which _I had never seen before and had had no idea was there_. The papers were pretty much the only thing to get chucked though. Everything else was packed into boxes and shoved into the loft of our new, much much smaller house. I loved this. The loft was converted and had windows, so I would spend afternoons rummaging in amongst the boxes, gazing out over rooftops, finding fascinating things, odd books and snippets of my mum's past.

Time passed, and my mum wasn't even able to afford the upkeep on our new house. I'd half moved out already, but would return in the holidays, and so we both got down to the business of sorting out our stuff. Mine was done in a day, all packed into boxes. I went to inspect what my mum was doing with the rest of the house.

It was chaos. Faced with 40 years of very real baggage, her hoarder mentality had short circuited and turned into an 'all or nothing mentality'. She had piled up nearly all her books to be sold off for peanuts to a dealer because 'there wouldn't be space'. Huge numbers of things were being put in bags to be thrown out. Over the next couple of days it carried on. She sold off the washing machine for no good reason, and when the skip was hired (there was a lot in the house, we really did need it!) precious things started to go onto it - her almost but never completed PhD thesis, photos and slides, some eighteenth century boots. She'd gone into a kind of frenzy of throwing away because she'd never really done it in earnest before and had no idea of moderation. Slowly, discretely, I scuttered round the house and made my selections. Books that I thought were unique, priceless, parts of my childhood, beautiful and snapshots of their time. Mementos that I knew my mum would miss if she threw them out and then looked back at what she'd lost. I selected the good photographs out of the seven large plastic roller-boxes stuffed full of them and stashed them in an album in one of my own boxes. I slipped in a few antiques that were portable and too good to get mindlessly chucked. I even bargained for a victorian harmonium that was about to get sold off and begged to be given it as an engagement present.

We moved into the new flat. It was small, but once I'd made up bookshelves it was clear there would have been more than enough space. I kept many of the items I'd salvaged just to keep them safe, but a lot I gave her back. "Oh, I was wondering where that was! I thought it'd gone with all the other things, I'm so glad you kept it."

The most amazing thing? I did all of this despite that fact that when I was four she'd thrown away my beloved bottle and my blankee because I was too old for them :( Ah, the lack of revenge...
( Hampster Squared has stuff at www.tilla.co.uk, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 19:33, Reply)

Pah! everything really.
Due to my mothers inability to pick a good-un on the husband front meant that we moved around a lot as kids, that coupled with her hatred of mess meant that I never got to keep things for long.

I have however, managed to keep some mementos since moving out many moons ago and still have them, like my records from my youth.

My bezzie mate was an only child and until recently, her mother had kept her bedroom and all her things from childhood together. My mate is in her 40's for God's sake.
( girlinthehole, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 19:19, 2 replies)