One day in late March or early April 2004 - almost exactly three years ago at the time of writing - I had an inspiration in the shower. This isn't the sort of image I try to conjure up normally, but bear with me.

At the time I was trying (and, for the record, failing) to throw away a lot of stuff to make way for someone to move in to my flat for a year as I was going to be away. It was a slightly dispiriting process, as one of the problems with holding on to things is that after a while you keep them almost to justify having them in your life at all. After all, a chocolate wrapper today is rubbish, but in twenty-five years it will be a pop culture curio. So I was wondering if there was some way I could trick myself into turning throwing things away into a positive process.

And I thought that perhaps I could have a website, where I recorded all the things I threw away, or gave away or just discarded, or at least some of those things, or at least the ones I was having a problem getting rid of, psychologically. It seemed like a good idea, in some strange, soapy, way.

As soon as I was dry enough to work the computer, I bought myself the URL thingsithrewaway.com. And of course I never made the website. In fact, I pretty much threw away the URL itself, which is quite ironic when you come to think about it. But I kept renewing it, and I'm not sure why. Probably the same reason I might hold on to an old lolly stick or a plastic spoon from Macdonalds.

And then one day I made this website, possibly the most inexplicable part of the whole process. And yes, one thing I threw away quite early on was any sense of taste.