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| Oo-er! You saucy thing |
I was foraging around in the back of one of my kitchen cupboards earlier tonight when I rediscovered this old sauce bottle. I can remember when we first got it, back in the late 1960s or early '70s (or maybe I'm only recalling when I first noticed it, rather than when it was first purchased), and it was still in regular use up until a few years ago.
Criv-ites will be all too aware of how 'obsessed' I am with items and their associations, and this is a perfect example of my predilection for waxing lyrical and profound over the most trivial of things. One glance at this sauce bottle instantly transports me over 40 years into the past, and I'm once again sitting at our long-gone dining table - on the very chair (one of four, two surviving) that I'm perched on as I type this.
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| 'My' old back garden in 1988 - over 16 years after we'd moved |
Through the window (replaced with double-glazing around 24 years ago) of my former home, I gaze upon my back garden, and I'm once more a callow youth, with no notion that I would ever live anywhere else but that house. There is a comfort that comes from the familiar, and long-owned objects (even a humble condiment container) provide a gateway to earlier times that I experience with such clarity that it feels like the present rather than the past.
Is there something that you still possess from decades back which acts as a conduit to an earlier, fondly-recalled time in your life, before you got old and the shadows lengthened? If so, I'm all ears (as Mister Spock would say) - and you know where the comments section is!
18 comments:
What? Just the one? How common! We had a brown one too for the HP.
Yup, that was us - common as muck. I think we had two sauces too, GB, but my father could only have had the chance of one plastic bottle at the time, I think. I've got about 3 or 4 pairs of the things now, 'though - plus a mustard one (and I never use mouse-turd).
Whoa there, Kid! Nobody said anything about mustard. That's a condiment too far for my house.
I always thought we were more refined back then than other households; we had class up the wazoo, so we did.
The best place to keep class, I've always thought, GB.
We had a vinegar bottle with a cork stopper and a spout and everything - I THINK that's still knocking about in my mum's house.
I've kept hold of a plastic tray (white, with deckchairs all over it), it was always there when I was younger, and now it's in my very own kitchen. It's done well to survive this long, despite my sister's attempts to break it by using it as a sledge and so on.
I bet you'd never get rid of it now, THB. Funny how we become so attached to these links with our past, eh?
Never had one but those tomato shaped red sauce squeeze bottles usually seen in the local sit in chippy. I think Wimpy used to have them on the tables as well.
Ken.
I remember them, Ken - saw them in quite a few cafes. Wonder if they're collectors' items now?
I've got a bunch of stuff but I don't really dwell on the past much. I've got a fork, that I've eaten every meal with since I was about five. If guests who're of the kind who might pull their own cutlery from the drawer, it would cause problems because they would always, without fail, pick that fork, bloody typical.
Kid, you may have been "common as muck" but you were still posher than us because we just used the original bottle the sauce came in - the shame of it. I've got two sherry glasses that were bought in about 1977, they were originally part of a larger set of glasses but only these two have survived. The funny thing is that when I use them (which I did over Christmas) I'm not transported back to the time we first got them - I'm so used to them that I just don't get that kind of nostalgic feeling. I've also got a plywood board that my father gave me when I was about 10 to use as a drawing board (he also bought me big rolls of paper and I'd lie flat on the floor drawing with the board underneath). I mainly use the board now as an ironing board (laying it flat on the bed) but again I'm so used to it that it doesn't make me think of being 10 years old - in fact I'm often surprised to think how long I've had it. But even so the board and the sherry glasses are objects I'd never be parted from.
I've got a fork and spoon I've had since I was a bairn, which nobody was ever allowed to use but me, DSE (I made sure of that). I had to 'retire' them a number of years ago because the nickel-plating was wearing off, but I've still got 'em. I'd like to get them re-plated, but I'm scared to take them anywhere in case they get lost or damaged. They've got a little figure of Old Mother Hubbard and her dog looking into the larder on the base of their handles.
******
I know what you mean, CJ - sometimes, if we're seeing or using something every day, we tend to forget the nostalgic significance. With me, it's always lurking under the surface 'though, and sometimes it just jumps up and reminds me. There are some things I could never part with and it concerns me what will happen to them when I'm not here. Daft, ain't it?
It's not daft at all, Kid - it pains me to think of my things being chucked into landfill too, I'd like to think of them going to a "good home". When my parents died I tried to give away to charity as many of their things as I could but inevitably a lot of stuff had to be thrown away which was really difficult to do.
It must've been hard, sure enough, CJ. I've been contemplating enquiring about Lottery funding to establish a Museum of Childhood - a bit pie in the sky, I know, but I'd hate to think of my stuff being consigned to oblivion.
And, one of the reasons I'd much prefer my own museum is because, if I donated it to another one, most of my stuff would probably lie in storage somewhere and get damaged over time. Believe it or not, not everyone who works in a museum knows how to treat stuff with the required delicacy. "Oh, a Major Matt Mason - I had one as a kid!" Before you know it, Matt's wires are broken and poking through the rubber.
But if there was no other choice,Kid, you would donate them to a museum ? I know there's a Museum Of Pencils so a museum of vintage childhood memorabilia sounds reasonable. It's finally started snowing heavily outside, the first snow I've seen in two years !
If there were no other choice, I'm not sure what I'd decide, CJ. It would depend on the circumstances. We've got snow, too.
For me nothing quite brings out the inner child like standing at the front door and watching the snowflakes tumbling down in the glow of the street lamps, it's magical - that's what I was doing last evening and I nearly missed it, about an hour earlier we'd had the mother of all hail showers and I only looked out to see if the hailstones had melted when I saw it was snowing heavily.
Freshly fallen snow is great, CJ. Slush is another matter. There's a photo of my dog on the blog (ooh, a poem), out in the falling snow - and at night, too.
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