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When I was young, I remember sitting upon the couch with my Great Aunt. Despite being fantastically hairy and smelling strongly of lavender and moth-balls I liked sitting with her. This was mainly due to the large supply of boiled sweets that she kept in a large leather handbag by her feet. I had learned that if I asked her about the good old days, she would sit back, close her eyes and smile to herself before rambling on in an aimless fashion about whale-boned corsets and the time when she was groped on a trolly-bus during the London Blitz. While she was engrossed, I would have the chance to steal sweets from her bag.
One day while I was surreptitiously destroying my teeth on some of my great aunt's confectionery, she mentioned that it was a great shame that people had to clean their houses. It had been so much simpler when she had been a girl.
Stupidly, I asked her why.
"Because of the Fluff-Man of course" she said. Apparently when fluffy toys were first introduced, they were so popular that there had been a shortage of fluff with which to make them with. In order to resolve the problem, teams of men roamed the neighbourhood removing fluff from under people's couches.
"It's all changed now" she said. "What with computer games and electric gizmos the kids don't want fluffy toys any-more. When I was a girl you could eat your dinner off of the floor under your couch, but not now".
Until that day I had always considered my great aunt to be a bit do-lally, but after she had gone back to the asylum I looked under the couch and she had been right.
There was tons of fluff under there.
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