Friday 16 August 2013

IN RECEIPT OF A MEMORY...



I was cleaning out an exterior cupboard in our back porch the
other day and, in a dufflebag hanging on a nail, I found this receipt
from 1982, revealing the fate of various familiar household items -
most of which I had grown up with.

The tea set and the cruets could well have belonged to my grand-
parents, recently inherited by us upon their deaths, because I'm not
quite sure which ones they were.  The mirror, sewing machine, table
and log box, however, had all accompanied me in my journey through
childhood and my teenage years, right up into adulthood, and are still
sorely missed by me.  I have photos of them somewhere and shall dig
them out at some point and add them to this post. (The table and log
box, 'though, have popped up in previous posts on this blog.)

However, it's strange to be able to put an exact date to their
departure after all these years.  And the £40 my parents were paid
for the items is nothing short of robbery, even for 1982.  I sometimes
wonder where they are now.  Did someone eventually buy them from
the robber - oops, I mean dealer - in a single acquisition, or were they
subsequently bought separately and now residing in different homes
all acrosss the country?  I don't suppose I'll ever find out, but, if
I could, I'd buy them all back again.

The survival of the receipt is surprising.  The fact that it must
have come with us when we moved away in 1983, then back to this
house when we returned in 1987, boggles my imagination.  Lying in
a dufflebag for 30-odd years, waiting to fulfill its destiny of revealing
to me the exact date when fondly cherished items from yesteryear
were untimely ripped (at poor recompense) from my company.

That means, of course, that they've been absent from my life
far longer than they were ever a part of it.  Only in the physical sense
'though, because, truth to tell, they're never far from my thoughts and
sometimes, for brief periods, I forget that they no longer inhabit my
home, and aren't more than just an arm's reach or a room away.

******

"Sweet is the memory of distant friends!  Like the mellow rays
of the departing sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart."

Washington Irving.

******

I should add, in the interests of historical accuracy, that the log
box may not have been the large one I'm thinking of, but rather a
smaller one we 'inherited' from my grandparents when they moved
into an old folks' home at the end of the 1970s.  The larger one may
have been dispensed with at the beginning of  '81 when I was staying
down in Southsea for a few months.  Age, alas, prevents me from re-
calling exactly which one it was with my customary precision.  How-
ever, the smaller box was also a feature of my childhood, as it was
from this that my brother and myself were each given two bars of
chocolate on our weekly Sunday visits to my grandparents.

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