‘It is universal’: The one drawer that every family household has

You know the drawer; it’s the one that is crammed full of stuff that may never see the light of day again once it’s in there

“Do we have any sticky tape?” my daughter called out to me the other day. “I don’t know, check the drawer,” I called back.

She knew exactly what I meant, because we all do, don’t we? We all have that one drawer that’s in all our kitchens or, for the fancy people among us, our walk-in-pantries.

You know the drawer; it’s the one that is crammed full of stuff that may never see the light of day again once it’s in there, but we stubbornly refuse to throw out, just in case there may come a time when we urgently need a single helium balloon.

Now, in most households, this drawer is the third drawer down.

This is because the first drawer is for our everyday cutlery, the second drawer is for bigger items like salad servers, and the third drawer is for everything else which may differ from household to household; but in every home will include the three following items: some Blu Tack, a ball made of rubber bands in case we are ever asked to fashion a tennis ball, and a cache of spare keys that we have no idea what they actually open. At least some of them, however, will be those teeny tiny ones we have never used for our luggage.

And while I’ve known about this particular drawer and its wildly miscellaneous contents for a long time, what I didn’t consider is that it’s universal. I was talking with a friend the other day about the concept of the third drawer down and its contents (I am scintillating company, let me tell you) when her husband, who is Irish, called out, “You mean the Shite Drawer, that’s what we call it.” Aah, the Irish, such poetic people.

Anyway it turns out that the Irish’s Shite Drawer, and our Third Drawer Down are one and the same – in fact, we did a quick, international audit of the contents of said drawers and discovered that many items are to be found in kitchen drawers from Dubbo to Dublin.

These are, in no particular order, takeaway menus for every pizza restaurant within a 20km radius, batteries of various sizes which we cannot say for certain are used or not, single rubber bands that did not make it into the tennis ball, business cards – mostly for outside house washing and/or tree lopping services, some tubes of Super Glue that are now superglued together, a torch that does not work, and enough pencils, rulers, scissors, and erasers to open a small stationery business.

Frances Whiting. Picture: David Kelly

Then there are the more individual items – in our case, foreign currency, mostly from countries we have not been to, and a label maker from the time I briefly became delusional and thought I was the sort of person to label things.

In any case, in a world that is becoming increasingly marked by the things that divide us, from the small to the heartbreaking, there is a part of me that takes some comfort to know that, in households all around the world, we share some everyday commonalities.

That, nestled in our drawers, are small talismans of the lives we all share, and that somewhere right now, somewhere in the world, there is another person looking for an AA battery in exactly the same place we are.

Originally published as ‘It is universal’: The one drawer that every family household has