Herself and Daughter Number Four went away for a couple of nights, leaving me in charge of the house. I was given a short but specific set of instructions: 1. Be nice to the dog2. Fix the table.I’m not mean to the dog. It’s not that I don’t like dogs. It’s just that our dog isn’t too bright and barks excessively; and that’s not my thing. Largely, we ignore each other. In my mind, the dog occupies the Annoying Family Member category: a person who, if you weren’t related to them, you might not be friends with. But family is family. Anyway, we all knew the dog wouldn’t need much minding as, every summer, she becomes obsessed with a drain cover in the back garden. She stares at it for hours, occasionally cocking her head as if it’s singing to her. She has to be coaxed away from it to be brought for walks.This was good as task number two – fix the table – involved dragging it out to the back garden and sanding it. The lawnmower, the vacuum cleaner or any power tool usually sets off a frenzy of barking. But with the drain to stare at, it was as if she couldn’t hear the sander at all. The table wasn’t broken. It needed a bit of a glow-up. We’ve had it for a gazillion years and it travelled with us from our previous home. (One of the criteria for buying the house we’re in now was that the table would fit.) And in that time, it’s been used for everything. Stacking clothes. Doing homework. Painting. Drawing. Liquids and foodstuffs have been spilled on it countless times. Family members have sat around it – everyone with their assigned seat – sometimes laughing, or arguing, or morose or content. We’ve been bored at that table, or wildly stimulated. Depressed or optimistic. And as I began the sanding, I could see the physical evidence of all the life that has been lived around it. Stains and flecks of paint. Embedded slime. Scratches and deep grooves of mysterious origin. It took most of the day, and even though the table had been in awful state and needed it, I also felt a tinge of regret for erasing all that history. It made me think of Only Fools and Horses. There’s a scene where Trigger speaks proudly about his broom. He has owned it for two decades: during which he’s replaced the head 17 times and the handle 14 times. It’s quickly pointed out to him that it’s not the same broom he started with.[ Seán Moncrieff: Time is slowly kicking the crap out of meOpens in new window ]This may or may not have been inspired by a thought experiment devised by the ancient philosopher Plutarch: Theseus owns a ship, but over time rotting planks are replaced until nothing remains of the original construction. Is it the same ship?There is no right or wrong answer to this. Philosophers have grappled with this paradox and various iterations of it for centuries. It throws up questions about identity, how we categorise objects, how our brains perceive the world. I hadn’t replaced any part of the table, but I had smoothed away all the lumps and bumps that had given it personality, that everyone who has sat at it has helped create. By the time I had stained and oiled it, it was pristine. Like nothing had ever happened here.Having no one else to ask, I consulted the dog. Even for her, the table is significant. It’s where she goes to whine for food and occasionally, be lifted on to someone’s lap. She gave it a bit of a sniff, then trotted back out to the drain. I took this to be a good sign. In a year or two, when more life has been lived around it, it will go back to looking like someone attacked it with a hammer. There’s a certain comfort in that.