Hello Storm and all. I have two roasting tins and two tin plates (“made in China”) that my grandmother used to cook with. Roast beef to apple pie to cheese on toast. Been using them for the same things for 20 odd years. Don’t see any reason to buy new stuff when the old stuff works. I don’t know how ‘we’ manage to ‘consume’ all the stuff I see in shops. I guess most people don’t like old stuff and want everything new and shiny. On credit. I find that really quite nuts, I can’t understand it. My Nan wasn’t a great cook but she was my role model so I like to use her stuff.
My breadboard is one I rescued from the broken-down derelict house where I used to spend time, ‘live’ I guess, with the man who I walked away from and have not ‘got over’. Every day I guess it chides me, or something. He’d left and I found it amongst the broken stuff so I kept it. It’s also quite useful, practical. Probably.
I have a few items my grandfather brought back from 'foreign parts' when he was on business. I stole/removed these from their house, when he was dead and my grandmother was living in a care home. I treasure those things. No-one else would know that they were/are important to me. Their son, my father, is a compulsive keeper of stuff, without discrimination. Obsessed in a bad way with old stuff. Broken stuff, rubbish, things that he doesn’t even know who they belonged to or what they are. Drives step-mother to distraction.
I have my parents’ wedding album. Dad gave it to me when I was pre-teen. I don’t like it. The people getting married are clearly not together. They’re both doing it for some spectacle, like film stars. I asked my mother once for her engagement ring to my father (she was showing me her jewellery…?) and she refused.
I have love letters from my 17 year old not-yet-mother to my not-yet-father (discovered and stolen/removed from grandparents’ house). I have love letters from both grandparents to each other. And a half-penny from 1868. And a Gold Sovereign that my grandmother’s brother sent back (literally) from the WW1 trenches, before he died there. She gave it to me saying she’d know I’d look after it. She didn’t give it to my father?
When my step-father died, mother mentioned that perhaps she should give his ring (which was his mother’s) to his daughter by his first marriage. I said I thought that would be appropriate. I was shocked beyond words the next time I saw her, to see her wearing it. Like she’d appropriated his image, had swelled herself up with his personality, was feeding somehow. She carries his photo in her (man’s) wallet. She has never carried my photo. This is the man who “ruined her life”. This is the man who verbally tortured her. This is the man who controlled her every move. She forgets that this was the man I had to live with. Sorry.
I have my past life in a box, diaries, writings, photos, letters. I have many letters from my mother and father, sent to me from each others’ houses. I guess invading each other’s houses through me. People stick stuff through a hole in my house, I find that intrusive, don’t you? US-style box-on-a-post letterboxes are so much better.
It’s all tat. Other stuff I chuck out, although I do have every salary advice I’ve earned. (I can defend that little pile, quite illogically.) And I’m beginning to see how I’ve accepted the role as the repository for all the paternal family’s stuff. Another responsibility. What a responsible child I must have been.
Thanks Stormchild. Anything of interest/similarity for you there? Why are they ‘transitional’ objects (what does that mean please?).
