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 grandparents, 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 across 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 Duffel Bag 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.
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"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.
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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 recalling exactly which one it was with my customary precision. However, 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.
Yes, and keeping receipts is the only way to remember when you bought something. My mother had the same radio for years and years AND YEARS. She'd had that radio for so long it was like it had always existed since the dawn of time. Then I was rummaging around in a drawer one day and I found the receipt - the radio had been bought on December 31st 1979 so the very last day of the '70s, fancy that ! My mother had that radio for nearly 29 years and it finally gave up the ghost in late 2008 - only a year before my mother died. In contrast I bought a digital radio on December 12th 2012 and it conked out on December 29th 2014 - just 2 years and 17 days later !
ReplyDeleteI'm convinced that everything is built with a limited life span nowadays, CJ, to encourage us to keep buying new things, Once, a light bulb could last for 30 years, now you're lucky if it lasts 30 days (or even minutes, in some cases).
DeleteThere's definitely seems to be a short life span for digital radios - the first one that I bought in 2006 lasted only 6 years and it was only in the final year that I was able to receive a digital signal (I'd had to use FM for the first five years) so as a purely digital radio it lasted just one year. When I went to buy a new radio in December I decided to go back to trusty old analogue but there was only one analogue radio available which cost just £9 so in the end i bought that as an emergency back-up and bought yet another digital radio - but i expect this one to last no longer than the others. If they want us all to switch to digital they'll have to do better with the radios. Unless I've just been really unlucky of course !
ReplyDeleteYou didn't buy any lucky white heather at around the same time, did you?
DeleteIt's fun coming across stuff that was saved from long ago. I came across an old piece of correspondence I had with someone working for a major publisher out of NY that wanted me to send him a copy of a certain film he wanted to see, not sure why I kept it but it was just something tucked away for years.
ReplyDeleteI have an old postcard in my collection going back 107 years ago by someone who was upset that the person he sent a previous postcard to didn't respond at all. Fun reading this stuff.
You should stick that on your blog, Chris - I'd like to see it, and I'm sure others would too.
ReplyDeleteI'll see. Haven't seen them in a while so I'll have to go look or them first.
DeleteIn your own time of course, Chris. No rush.
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