They're sort of too impressive to throw away - after all they have to protect the relatively fragile eggs from transportation, hurling, incompetent shoppers and supermarket checkout staff who not only insist on putting your stuff in the carrier bag for you but decide that the best place for the eggs is under the potatoes.
Not that they work perfectly - when any public holiday is coming up you'll find there are only three egg boxes left, each half full of egg (substance) rather than eggs (things), as each shopper has checked the boxes and swapped out the broken ones but they're definitely, to use a rather nauseating phrase, a design (and engineering) classic.
So they accumulated on our shelves above the fridge.
They do have a number of uses:
- They can be used for sound insulation: just cover your walls with egg boxes.
- When you have done this, spray-paint them silver, and your pad will look just like a set from The Tomorrow People circa 1972.
- And of course, they make the ideal fire hazard in this state.
- You can use them for holding small things, such as the screws from a recently-dismantled vacuum cleaner or video-recorder.
- Alternatively, a number of them can be fashioned and painted to make the base section of a Dalek costume.
- I have it on good authority that they can be used for chitting potatoes. I do not know what this means and am afraid to find out, as it sounds far too bucolic for my tiny urban mind to handle. Still, if you need potatoes chitting...
- If the worst comes to the worst you can use them to hold eggs (for example, if you buy a lot of them). Which is why we were holding on to them, I think. But then we never did buy a lot of eggs, and anyway we don't use that many.