one red paperclip, but the other way around

Kyle MacDonald started with one red paperclip and, through the wonder of the internet, managed to swap it for a house in only fourteen steps. This sounds even more impressive when you appreciate that the steps included a pen in the shape of a fish and a Kiss snow-globe. He wrote a book about his trip and, if you buy a copy, you may hear a slight grinding noise. That would be the sound of Dave Gorman taking out his frustration on his teeth as I'm sure he wishes he'd thought of it first.

Although, since Dave Gorman was responsible for Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, he should feel that he has already had his American Pie moment (the song, not the film). That's not to say that, like Don Maclean, he should never produce anything of similar quality again but merely that he shouldn't feel too hard done by if the muse-of-world-beating-killer-ideas doesn't come to visit again any time soon.

(As an aside, my favourite interpretation of the song American Pie was Don Maclean's own. He was asked what the song meant and replied, "It meant that I never had to work again.")

We are currently engaged in a reverse process to Kyle's, complicated by the fact that it only involves our own possessions and that they must all remain inside our own home. The problem began when we finally replaced the futon which, useful as it has no doubt been, was never intended to have been the place we called bed for quite so many years. At first, given the strangeness of the British furniture market, the new mattress arrived and was duly deposited atop the futon, thus giving a better vantage point from which to examine the ceiling and the tops of the wardrobes. The comfort was excruciatingly good - excruciating in that it led to a torrent of "why didn't we do this years ago?" and other similar refrains. The second step led to the problems. The bed frame arrived.

The futon gracefully stepped to one side, the new bed was assembled, crowned with the new wonder-mattress and slept on with wild abandon and great delight. And yet, like the ghost of sleeping past, the giant grey elephant futon in the room glowered at us, taking furniture-delight in the knowledge that we didn't have the slightest idea what to do with it. It blocked the bookcase. Its lumbering bulk got in the way of the filing cabinet. It doesn't take much for piling to seem easier than filing - and needing to move a futon out of the way effortlessly moved the scales in favour of the pile of pity, the stack of shame, the collection of crepuscular crap.

It was enough to make the hairs on the back of your trousers stand on end.

We toyed with the idea of moving the bookcase away and sliding the futon back against the wall, on the grounds that the bookcase was marginally smaller than the futon and so we were reducing the size of the problem. Still a long way to go to get it down to the size of one red paperclip. The bookcase could then go into the lounge, displacing the CD tower and the wooden shelving unit housing the circa 1989 stereo and, sadly, unfit for any other purpose.

This would then swap down to two items needing rehousing - the beautifully crafted home for the stereo (and the black, seemed-a-good-idea-at-the-time, Ikea CD tower). Unfortunately, it would also remove the bookcase from the bedroom - as well as the calming influence of the presence of books, it also gave a surface for photographs, as well as the Bob Dylan overflow from the black, Ikea, etc CD tower.

The lounge would then have a CD tower in a window bay which would be, let's face it, a waste of window bay space and the stereo would have to sit in place of N's dolls' apartment (as opposed to the dolls' house or dolls' treehouse - any explanation of that will have to wait).

So, we could swap down to one home for city-dwelling dolls while messing up the arrangement of much furniture in two different rooms, all to house a futon which wasn't a particularly great bed and was not endearing itself to us as it was clearly even worse as a sofa. I bought it many years ago - from 2008, looking back, I can't quite work out why.

So, instead, the futon frame has been taken apart and put in the loft - the long piece balancing quite satisfyingly over roof beams. I hope it is stable enough not to make a spectacular re-entry into the flat but, if it ever does, it will at least destroy the kitchen ceiling and possibly take out the fridge, rather than landing on N or us in the middle of the night.

The futon mattress has been cunningly folded in half and then in thirds and leans against the bookcase like a bad yet achingly fashionable chair. The problem has reduced in size. The paperclip seems a long way off. Anyone want to buy a futon? Buyer to collect.