I've got the secret

[venta]

Continuing the theme[*] of pointless curiosity about other people's lives, today I would like to know what other people have on their keyrings. Do you have a "keyring", ie some sort of novelty object attached for the aesthetic wossnames? Do you have useful things which aren't keys? If your bunch o' keys is massively bulky, how do you carry it about?

My keys live in the front, right pocket of my trousers. At least, they usually do. Today I'm wearing a pair of rather elderly green cords, and there is a large hole in the pocket so my keys are very confusingly in my laptop bag.

To remain pocketable, the bunch of keys has to be reasonably small so it contains only the bare essentials: at present, it seems I consider these to be the four keys required to get into my flat, the key to my bike D-lock, a 4GB USB memory stick and a chunky bottle opener.

Yes, four keys to get into my flat. One for the door to the main building, one for the main lock on my front door. Plus two more keys for the two separate deadlocks on my front door. The flat's previous owners liked their door locks. (They really did - in order to open the back door there is one Yale lock, one mortice lock, one security chain and two bolts.)

The memory stick is of no particular function, it's just a useful sort of thing to have around. It's phsyically tiny, and was a Christmas present from ChrisC. Attaching it to my keys means I invariably have it with me.

The bottle opener is for crown cap bottles, and advertises Cantrell's Ginger Ale. (A cursory google to see if Cantrell's still exists turns up a suggestion that my bottle-opener is in fact cast iron. Wikipedia also tells me that Dr Thomas Cantrell claimed to have invented ginger ale.) I picked up the bottle-opener when we were clearing my great-aunt's house out in Sheffield seven or eight years ago. It lives on my keys for much the same reasons as a memory stick; it's always there, and you never know when you might want one.

What've you got on yours?

[*] You are almost all wrong about mayonnaise, y'know.

Comments

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

I used to keep a data stick on my keyring, but then I had a couple of incidents where I used the datastick at work and left it plugged in to my PC, went home... and had to come all the way back to get my keys. At the moment my keyring has my two house keys (main front door and my door) and another key which opens my cupboard under the stairs, a tag with the name and phone number of the estate agents on it, and another number which would presumably allow them to return my keys to me if they were found and handed in, and a plastic barcode tab which is a membership for the local public library. I haven't used the public library since signing up when I first moved here (so that I could use their internet while I was waiting for mine to be set up), and the estate agents have changed hands and name, so they're not particularly handy. I recently acquired a miniature screwdriver for tightening (or loosening, I suppose) the screws on glasses, which could live in my keyring, but would make holes in my pockets and the pockets of my handbag, and somewhere I have a little rubber brain keyring, which I should attach. I did have a keyring consisting of a piece of polished stone (snowflake quartz, possibly), but the screw came out of the stone. There's also the clippy end of another defunct keyring; I can't remember what was on the other end. I seem to be rather rough on keyrings.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, I broke a lot of keyrings before I decided that actually, they weren't that essential. The only robust one I ever had was a freebie advertising Guinness, although it was really bulky.