I can’t help it, I just can’t throw old tea away.

There, I said it. I feel better.

I’m not usually overly sentimental – when I moved back to Sweden from the UK I filled one small moving box, the rest was given away or unceremoniously slung.

When it comes to tea, however, I can look at a battered old tin and suddenly become Olympic standard dewy-eyed, hopelessly nostalgic about The Time We Bought This Tea At That Place.

What makes it worse is that some of the stuff on Bin Row was pretty awful to begin with.

Take the tea bags in the picture above, for instance. They were bought for emergency use only, and thanks to a mix-up became even worse after being stored in close proximity to some lemon scented green tea bags, themselves a mere one degree of nastiness above cough medicine.

Some of the tea was good enough to start with – there’s a strawberry black tea from Imperial Teas, as well as an almond flavoured black tea from A. G. Perch in Copenhagen – it’s just that they were at their best quite some time ago. It’s not as though the tea has gone off, it’s just that there’s very little aroma left.

Then there’s the Earl Grey tea bags. It’s altogether possible that the British Museum might pay to take them off my hands, although my preference would be to have them destroyed by fire by a priest of the type more used to casting out demons.

I can do it. I can throw them out. Open the bin, pour them in. Job done.

Think of the things I could do with the extra space in the tea cabinet!

I’ll do it! Next week!

Maybe….