Amongst the pile of things readied to go to the bin men next week is an old kitchen table. Our bin men are a fine bunch (I'm obliged to say that) who, so far at least, will happily take anything we throw at them. Armchairs, sofas, mattresses, unwanted bookshelves - all have gone the way of the crusher. But the kitchen table is what currently occupies my mind.

It's rickety - even when one gets underneath it like a mechanic and really tightens up the bolts that hold the legs on, it still retains a significant degree of ricketiness. Similarly the accompanying chairs - the seats are flattened and unyielding, the material is faded and torn, and the spindles in the back are half in, half out of their retaining holes. It's certainly past its prime. It's actually the table that graced the kitchen of the bungalow in which my paternal grandparents lived for more than twenty years, and of course that is the reason that there is a slight... not reluctance, to throw it away, but certainly a hesitation.

It's been niggling at me somewhat. The table hasn't been in service for some time. We've had it for, I think, three years, but we haven't had it in use for at least the past eighteen months - in fact it's been dismantled and stored in bits beside our wardrobe for quite some time. Last week in a furious, and rare, period of tidying, it was decided that it was time for it to go, so the table has spent the past week in the kitchen (it having been moved from bedroom to kitchen, on the grounds that this is one step nearer to getting through the front door and ultimately out to the dustcart). Consequently I've seen, and still see, it every time I go into the kitchen.

I experienced a similar sense of... of whatever this feeling is, some six years ago. On that occasion I was selling my hotch-potch collection of Star Wars toys. Partly because of lack of space, partly because of lack of money, I decided to advertise my collection (and yes, it did include that holy of holies, the Palitoy Cardboard Death Star) and it quickly went. So, alas, did the resulting cash, although at least two utilities and a local council were pleased about that.

It would be silly of me I think, to suggest that I was sorry to see the back of the Cardboard Death Star, the Millennium Falcon, and all, because I wouldn't be able to play with them again. It wasn't the lack of toys that got to me, any more than it's the physical object of the table that nags at me now. Just as I haven't used the table (and chairs - let's not forget the chairs) in more than a year, so I hadn't played with my Star Wars figures and playsets for probably a decade or more before I sold them. What I was sad to lose wasn't the things, but the associations, as though in some way I feared that my memories would go with them.

I didn't want to have a Kenner Snowspeeder sat on my shelf until the day I die, but having said that there is a sense that if I did still possess it I would somehow have a tangible link with that wonderful day in 1983 when, due to strikes, I got the afternoon off school and spent it upstairs on the ice planet Hoth. Or that if I still had my X-Wing fighter, my friend Peter Smith might come around again and make those ludicrous sound effects like he did just after "Return of the Jedi" came out.

Similarly, if I keep that table and those chairs, might I somehow still have a link with the kitchen in the bungalow of my grandparents' house. Could it in some way take me back to those heady days when we would make the long journey from Carlisle back down to Cornwall for the Summer holidays, and more often than not arrive just in time for lunch? Would it let me slip back to roast lamb eaten at that table - served with mint sauce made from home-grown mint, which at the time I didn't like, but which even the thought of now makes me drool?

No. Of course it wouldn't. But in following my train of thought I think I may have come to a discovery. There is a little carved wooden figure in our sitting-room. It's of a countryman, I think, an umbrella under one arm, a pipe in his hand, and for years it stood in my paternal grandparents' sitting-room. It stood along with many other things - the Lords Prayer in Welsh, a nest of tables, an old Copper Kettle and a Copper firescreen - which in some way 'defined' that room. They were 'permanent' fixtures if you like, but of course they have now been dispersed to other homes in the family. This carved little man hasn't always occupied the same place in our sitting-room since we've had it, and he has moved from the top of the TV, to the mantelpiece, to his current home atop the sub-woofer; but he is always on view. And of course every time I see him, on some level he always reminds me of where he used to be, and who he used to belong to.

I think, as my train of thought brings me at last into the station of conclusion (dreadful metaphor - heartfelt apologies) that the nagging feeling at bidding farewell to my AT-AT walker and my Boba Fett figure, and also now to the rickety old table and chairs, is partly a fear that the lack of a visual prompt will lead to a lack of recollection, and that this in turn might lead to me actually forgetting. Peter Smith's X-Wing noise (he never could really do the TIE fighter, but then who can) isn't an important memory in the scale of things, any more than my Grandpa's home-grown mint or his back-garden full of raspberries or the fact that my Gran's bin was the first pedal-bin I ever saw... And yet, on the other hand, they are such fundamental parts of my memory, and by extension me, that it would be unimaginable to suddenly not remember them.

I don't think we've reached any world-shattering conclusions here, but in a rather self-indulgent way it has at least helped me work out why I have been gazing at a shaky old table with a kind of melancholy this past week. Apologies for such introspection in a public place. Well, the bin men can have the table and chairs, just as a canny collector based somewhere in the Truro area once had the slightly-battered Cantina Playset, and R2-D2 (now with sensorscope!). And in the absence of the things, I will just have to make sure that I... remember.