My wife doesn’t like mess, so over the years I’ve moved a lot of stuff under the house. I’ve always intended to go through it and work out what’s worth keeping and what’s just junk but, as I’m a busy man, I just never get around to it.

Anyway, there’s this company who came along and said that they’ll take all the stuff, sort through it, sell what’s valuable and they’ll give me some of the money.

Well, this is a pretty good deal, right? I mean, I’ll never do actually do anything with it myself, so getting some money is better than no money. They estimate that it could be worth thousands of dollars. Millions even, depending on whether anyone actually wants to buy my early poetry and diaries from last century. But failing that, my eighties memorabilia is a hot item and they’ll have no trouble selling it.

I’ve agreed, but my wife is proving harder to convince. She’s a little upset because, in order to move the stuff, they want to build a path through our backyard.

“They’ll ruin the garden,” she told me, but I assured her that they’ve promised to restore the garden just as soon as they’ve got all the stuff.

“And they’re going to pay for the path through our garden,” I told her. “We only have to lend them the money.”

“Why do we have to lend them the money?” she wanted to know.

“Well, you don’t expect a bank to lend them the money, do you? Besides, a bank would make them pay interest and they don’t want to do that!”

Then she wanted to know how much we’d be getting.

“Well, I told them that a royalty of five dollars a day would be enough… But they don’t want to pay anything for the first month, because they’ll be setting up then and they’re not expecting to make money straight away… I didn’t agree to that, of course! I told them that they’d have to pay twenty cents a day from the moment that they’ve laid the path.”

My wife still didn’t think that it seemed like a good deal.

“Look,” I told her. “we’ve still got a mortgage and I’m only working part-time. Our son’s looking for more work. The company has told me that there’ll be dozens of jobs and that should help us all.”

“If you two are going to be doing the work anyway, why don’t you just do it and keep all the profit for yourself?” she wanted to know.

I patiently explained that we didn’t have the expertise.

She was silent for a moment. “Ok, but how do you know that you can trust this company?”

I told her the name, and she looked them up on the internet.

“They’ve been involved in some very dubious practises,” she informed me. “They’re under investigation for fraud and corruption charges.”

“But that shouldn’t be a problem. That was in another country.”

“Oh well, in that case, there’s no problem. Let’s tell them they can start tomorrow.”

“Unfortunately, we still have to get permission from our next door neighbours because they’ll have to knock down their fence and garden as well. And you know how they keep trying to tell us that their garden is… I don’t know, spiritual or something… We may have to get the law changed so that it can’t be blocked by people opposed to selling relics from the twentieth century. I mean, some people are just opposed to progress.”

“Perhaps you should go and explain to them how important this is and how they may get jobs from it.”

“No, they seem to think that some things are more important than jobs and money.”

“Well, they’re right. Some things are more important than that.”

I stopped the conversation there. There was no point continuing if my wife was just going to be irrational.