I am a handbag slut.

I am disgustingly slovenly and downright slatten in my handbag usage.

I should be ashamed of myself but its just too hot to care.

Or it was....

.... until half a kilo of sweeties melted in my lovely new handbag that was a gift from a friend, and stuck everything together in a big sticky mess in the bottom.

To be fair I had noticed over the course of the last week or so that the bag seemed to be getting heavier, and yet I had a distinct lack of car sweeties to chew on to relieve the tedium of my commute.

That should have been a clue, but not the first clue.

No the first clue should have been when I bought 4 packs of beads, and put them in my handbag never to be seen again - 5 weeks ago. They had been playing happy families snuggled up to my handy penknife complete with very useful compass, tweezers and scissors. (OK - I carry the pen knife for those little corkage emergencies - it can be a long drive to work you understand and a bottle of local red can do much more to relieve the tedium than a couple of boiled sweets).

The penknife in question was having an extracurriculum relationship with the first five pages of my English to French dictionary, which in turn begat the affair of the dictionary and the pack of Christmas cracker screwdrivers.

Down in amongst the scrum I also found 5 pens, some latex gloves, some blue baling twine (an absolute essential item to daily here in rural France), some 18 month old tobacco, a credit card holder, a tape measure, another pack of Christmas cracker screwdrivers, a horde of hairgrips, some tissues, a foldaway shopping bag, a couple of lip glosses (imagine how scrummy they were after a few weeks of high temperatures and not very well sealed lids), some clothes tags that I scrounged because they had a pretty pattern on that I was going to replicate for some embroidery, a pair of earrings, another 2 packs of beads that I have no memory of at all, and a blankety blank cheque book and pen!

Everything is now in my nice new handbag beautifully organised into little pockets with zips and compartments - wonder how long that will last?

And now I have to work out how to clean sticky sweetie mess from the lining of a leather bag without putting it into the washing machine.  (before the gift giver gets here on holiday)