One way to spend a Bank Holiday — An Elegant Sufficiency

Not travelling for sure, but very much at home in spite of anything the featured image might suggest.

In two week’s time, the builders will arrive to begin work on a project we’ve been planning for nearly two years. It began with needing a front door but soon escalated to a replacement porch and then onto rather bigger things, involving architects, planning permission and tendered contracts.

And such things have to begin somewhere.

In our case it was to empty our storeroom. This small, part-basement room has been where all kinds of things have been “stored” for the last thirty years and I’m sure I have no need to say that it was the task we least looked forward to.

Readers here and those who know me well will be familiar with my habit of collecting ephemera. I probably have no need to explain how many boxes of “stuff” we’d collected over the last thirty years of travelling, then.

“Souvenirs” in the pre-digital age, when air tickets were stapled together in booklets.

Very collectable in the bag with other, similar souvenirs like hotel receipts, menus and photographs from the trip..

This bag was filled with things from a trip to Thailand in 1997 and tempting though it was to sit and relive that fun adventure, there were others waiting to be sorted through.

And oh heck. The photographs! The hundreds and hundreds of photographs from all over the world, taken through the eyes of all three of us. And the negatives, of course. I emptied each photo wallet, placing the photos in a box, the negatives in one waste bag and the paper wallet in the bag for recycling.

Several boxes later, resisting the temptation to look through each of them until later in the evening, I thought I had got them all. And then we found another bag. Another box.

And 35mm slides!

Yesterday afternoon, when we both felt we’d made enough progress to allow ourselves some time off, I found a means of “scanning” these slides using my lightbox and my phone. For an hour or so I enjoyed revisiting (different) old times.

A college friend’s wedding from the late 1970s.

A sweet memory of a soon-to-be-qualified teacher and her children from a tiny Yorkshire school in the summer of 1977, the Silver Jubilee, when we had a celebration picnic on the village green and the cows strolled over and joined in the fun.

And pictures from the following summer when I went as a staff member with the Isle of Wight Youth Orchestra on tour to Ost-Holstein, not knowing that the week afterwards, I’d return home to meet my Hero for the first time.

Not everything made the cut. There seemed to be little point in keeping photographs taken in unknown places, of children I don’t recognise on activities I don’t remember.

And other blurry images and “mistakes” found their way into the same bag too. It’s not as though we don’t have others to look at!

But there are other curiosities too. Like this bag which I haven’t opened, yet. I’m sure it was intended for a mixed-media panel…and that’s not a spelling mistake, but “Entertainmint” was (and might still be?) a chocolate sweet in New Zealand, honestly!

The thing is, the more boxes we opened, the greater the surprises.

Some trinkets and my garter from our wedding day?

My Hero’s exam results, house adverts, letters from his grandparents for instance.

And my very first travel journal, from our holiday to Torquay in 1969, complete with sellotape! Inside is a letter from a schoolfriend, with news from home. Given that we were on holiday for just a week, how sweet is it that one 13 year old wrote and posted a handwritten letter to her friend, who treasured it in her scrapbook for more than fifty years? She sends her thanks for the postcard I had sent her, offers news of the weather in Hull that week and says how she is looking forward to going to “the baths” later that day. (In Hull, they were known as the swimming baths rather than the pool!)

So, whilst my Hero makes repeated visits to our local recycling centre, I have a bit to be getting on with. Not only sorting through photographs, but maybe reading one or two letters as well.