You can't always get what you want - but you can sometimes get a piece of laminated wood instead

Moving into an unfurnished house and being skint (one of us being temporarily unemployed) could only mean one thing: hours spent trawling Gumtree, Daily Info and Freecycle in search of free or bargainous items of furniture.

We've now managed to kit out the living room with an array of seating solutions (aka a bit of a rag-tag assortment of chairs), all for nowt courtesy of the latter site. (An aside: a year and a half ago I was forced into giving away for nothing a bedframe and mattress that had cost me £180 six months earlier, so I can be forgiven for shamelessly filling my boots in return, don't you think?) But part of the delight of regularly browsing Freecycle is seeing some of the bizarre things people both request and offer.

One poster was looking for "all or part of a dead goat" - for a play, apparently, though I suspect that may have been a front for the Oxford branch of the Satanists' Society. Another was offering "a piece of laminated wood", and helpfully included a photo for the benefit of prospective buyers. It seemed to have been snapped up, but a few days later was being reoffered - presumably because the person who responded to say they'd take it had sobered up.

The best offer of all was for four sachets of salsa from Discovery Fajita packs - still in date, the post stressed, though it also implied they were available on a buyer collect basis only...

Sometimes you can't help but sense a story behind the posts: "OFFERED: 2 hardback books - 'Sleep With Me' & 'Tips On Having A Gay Ex'" Sometimes, though, the apparent story is less amusing and more poignant: "OFFERED: Happy 3rd birthday balloons (7) which didn't get used and are no longer needed".

There's a book here just waiting to be compiled, if it hasn't already been.