Colourless

MrsM remembers everything: details of our lives that I forget - that I think most people forget. Faces, and names, on re-encountering people we have met once or twice and not seen for years. Details of our past lives - when and why we visited this or that place and what happened there. The origin and back-story of every object in our house. The minutiae of other people's lives: what their children are doing, their small triumphs and tragedies. It's a rare gift, and a hugely life-enriching one, for me as well as her. I'm not the only one who notices. This blip would have been shorter without her - and the first draft was wrong

The glass spheres came from a glassworks in Bath, a past birthday treat for me. We were allowed to select the glass decoration for our globe and 'help' blow it - at least for long enough to find how hard it is. The real treat was to watch highly skilled artisans practice their craft in front of us, all the more exhillarating for the frisson of danger in flying sparks and radiant heat

I thought that the eggs were decorated as a craft activity with our young children, when we had a lovely Greek art student living with us for a term. (This was something she had learned from her grand-mother. I just Googled her; she is the director of an international art fair in Athens, a respected art curator and a radio presenter. Wow). Not so. I was completely wrong - these eggs are decorated eggs from Austria, brought back from a school music trip. The Greek craft eggs are different eggs, safely hidden away somewhere- even false memories are good memories

The glass aubergine was a gift many years ago from MrsM's employer/friend at a local organic vegetable box business. On another year, she gave us crockery with carrots on

The bowl was bought longest ago of all, when we lived in a village called Cropredy, famous for the civil war battle at its bridge over the river Cherwell and, among folk music cognoscenti, as the location of the annual concert and festival led by the folk-rock band Fairport Convention. The band formed in 1967 and have held a concert there every year since its inauguration in 1976. [somewhere here, insert a joke about a record] MrsM took a liking to the bowl at one of the festivals - my excuse for not remembering is that it may have been the 1989 one, when I was in bed with chicken pox, the only thing I've had that was worse than Covid

So, memories - some of them mine - some of them wrong - assembled on the table, lending some colour to another colourless day