Ex Corde Gravitas

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I've moved house five times in the last five years. The thing I seem most prone to losing, which you may consider more carelessness than misfortune, is washing machines. But alongside the more major traumas of slipped discs, dropped vases and abandoned trampettes, it's the little things that cause the most hassle.

And tonight, as I try to reconstruct once again my gaming kit, that hassle is the discovery that I no longer own a single figure-of-eight power cord. How is it possible for any modern human being not to own a single figure-of-eight power cord? You get one free with every single thing you buy - consoles, battery chargers, printers, shoes, lottery tickets. If you're me, you hoard them, and label the plugs with white insulating tape and black marker pen, so your plug-boards read like shouty manifestos: CHARGE PS2 SPEAK TV PRINT CUBE! Words to live by, indeed.

But now I have none, which means buying one, which is an amazingly odd proposition. They're not products in their own right, surely. They're things that only come as adjuncts, like those white paper ties that come with sandwich bags. And isn't it immoral to be producing extra, retail cables when everyone (or everyone who hasn't moved five times in five years) has an abundance of them? They should have amnesty drop-boxes on street corners, where you can take them or leave them as your needs ebb and flow, like those smart new Parisian bikes. But they don't, and I don't, and so several thousand pounds worth of kit, hundreds of bits of processing power, and a few square feet of screen are currently nothing more than junk.

And as I sit here, with sweaty armpits and dusty knees, I swear to myself - as I have before, five times in five years - that I'll never do this again. That surely one day, eventually, I'll escape the Sisyphean tyranny of poking cables up the back of desks so that they can fall back down with a neat clunk as I emerge from under to try to catch them. I'll outgrow the anti-yoga of propping the bookcase up with one foot while hooking a crucial wire round the airborne corner with the other. I'll finally sleep the sound sleep of someone who doesn't have an eight-way plugged into a six way plugged into a splitter that doesn't have the right fuse now that I think about it.

And then I remember what a figure-of-eight cable looks like when you turn it on its side, and realise there is no end to this. Not ever.