A little bit of history. A story.

Today has been one of those challenging days that one is glad to see the back of for many reasons. In fact, that’s much like this entire first full week of the new year.

For many years I have considered that the challenges life throws up at you, however tough at the time, will one day become stories to tell others. Those little life snippets that you can use to provide guidance and counsel to a friend in need later on.

This evening I am sitting in my living room enjoying silence. There is no music, there is no television, the children are asleep in their beds and I able to simply sit here and ponder. And, as I do, I look around and it occurs to me that in the last few months, as my new life has begun, I have surrounded myself with furnishings and decorative items which would commonly be labelled ‘vintage’. But these are more than that to me: They are each items that hold a story.

I have two large steamer trunks which, at the very latest are from the 1940’s but probably a decade earlier: What did they hold? Who owned them? Where have they been? The romanticist in me wishes them to hold tales of love and a life of glamour and lavish. Perhaps one of them travelled through The Savoy, the subject of a blip a couple of days ago?

I have a Victorian wooden sledge, (I have plans for it’s use in this room) which I wanted it because it too has a history.

The books on my coffee table are fascinating to me. I picked them at random from an Antique Shop in Hastings Old Town and found some little gems. The earliest of these was published the year my great grand mother was born (1890: She died in 1992). But the dedications in them stand out. The story that each of these holds is one that you can’t help but smile at. ‘Aunt Emma, from Norman and Muriel’ reads one, from a book published in 1934. Why this book? Who are you?

Another, the words of which I can’t read, from Christmas 1927.

The most coincidental, ‘Robert, With love from Simmie. Many happy returns of the day, August 14th 1918. South Africa’. Coincidental because it was dedicated on my mum’s birthday 36 years before she was born. Again who are these people. And how did a book dedicated from or in South Africa at the end of the first world war, end up in Hastings 96 years later?

But referring back to my earlier thoughts that at some stage my stories will help provide guidance and counsel later in life, I am touched not by a dedication but by the first words published in one of the many volumes of Everyman’s Library from 1910:

'Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side.'

And on that note, I shall put the technological wonders of my iPhone, iPad and MacBook to one side and indulge in 30 minutes of perusing these books: to my brother's absolute delight, I'm sure.