It's So Easy To Leave Me

Tooli has gone head first into studying, so that meant that tonight we had to clamber into the attic and find Boy's old Higher Study papers.

It's too easy to get distracted up here. Is too lovely for words! Our whole history is here, and this is just one wee corner. We tried to clear it all out about 4 years ago, but Tooli was having such a tantrum, nothing was allowed to be thrown out. She had arrived home to the pile of things that her dad had sat to one side to go to the skip and was in tears for hours. She phoned me at work, to demand that I ban her dad from throwing out his wedding suit. "How can he throw it out? He married you in it".

We have boxes of papers from every year at School, and every scrap brought home from Nursery. We found the books she was looking for quite quickly, considering. But look at the other things we found. There were things we didn't even notice, there are so many of them.

The picture of St James Park, the Hallowed Ground where Boy worships. The Rocking Horse, Santa Brought Tooli on her 5th Christmas when she was still only 4. It's wearing Si's Sailor Hat, ribboned with HMS Dalriada, cause the last time he wore it, he was a reservist.

Right underneath the picture of St James Park, is a stack of LPs, with one of my favour albums of all time sitting in front of it. I was up there before contemplating what I had up there I could sell on Ebay, and I found that Album and knew I wasn't going to sell anything. I had sat and held that album looking at the cover remembering when I bought it (a second time, my first one was stolen), I adored that cover!

The smaller box in front of that holds 7inch singles. There's even an original RCA Elvis record in there, and some of the Beatles singles.

I see the golden hue of Si's home brewing kit! Jees but that stuff was lethal.

And in the box in front of that, I found a newspaper from 1998, the Daily Mail, dated 29th September. There's a picture in there of Boy and Tooli on the beach, - she is 4 and he is 7. It was Bank Holiday Weekend, and we had a blistering day. So unusual the press photographers were out in force snapping gorgeous kids on the beach! I think we did quite well ending up in the Mail!

Sadly my memory box was much farther over to the left, and I wasn't prepared to scramble over there to dig out my old love letters to photograph. I'll get Si to do that for me another time.

I looked at the mess, and all the paper, and thought, oh heavens, we really need to do something with it all, but then I turned and watched as Tooli picked up each carelessly stored jotter, or calendar, or ABC Magazine, and the sheer joy reflected in her face made me realise that we are never going to do anything with the mess.

I've left her up there, rummaging through our life. I doubt I'll see her again this side of Saturday.