Monday, December 9

 We've been in this unit for over four years so I suppose it's time for a bit of a change.  We've got rid of a bit of furniture and re-arranged the rest but we realised that more needed to be done.  The focus of all the furniture in the lounge-room is the TV; we might pretend that we don't watch much but the reality is that it's on in the morning before we have breakfast and is turned on again about 7 o'clock at night.  It would be silly not to arrange the chairs in the lounge to accommodate that.

In fact, my chair did not face the TV; I needed to slouch sideways to look at the screen and this was causing me some pain in the shoulder.  Something needed to be done.

Yesterday was the big day.  We recruited Jamie to do the hard labour and it wasn't a big problem. There are some dints in the carper which will disappear in time but the real issue is how to get power to our electric recliners.  Most of the cables will go under coffee tables and so on but we'll need mats for some areas.

And little mats are a problem!  I'm becoming so bumble-footed I tend to stumble on smaller mats and we could all see disaster ahead.  Large pieces of loose carper seem not to be such a problem so this might be the way to go.  I've discovered that Temu sell mats so I'm spending this morning on the internet.

AMONG MY SOUVENIRS                                                                     MAY 5, 2023

I can understand why many people collect souvenirs.  They are great reminders of good times and can evoke wonderful memories of places they have seen and people they have met.    Most people look for souvenirs which they can put on display for guests to appreciate.  Visitors with the barest of good manners will know that they are expected to notice the hand-carved native spear on the coffee table and make a comment which the host will grasp onto as an invitation to launch into another story about his travels. We all understand there is nothing better than an unusual object to elicit a conversation and everyone who has travelled is usually keen to share their experiences with anyone and everyone who will listen.

If one of the reasons for collecting souvenirs is to use them as a way of opening a conversation about interesting places in the world that you have visited, it is important to select an object which will catch attention: something which is exotic or eye-catching, which suggests there is an interesting story attached. 

My wife and I are unusual in that we don’t go out of our way to collect souvenirs from places we’ve been.  I like to say that we adhere to the admonition, “Leave only footprints, take only memories” but the reality is we’ve never been interested in collecting more stuff to clutter up our lives.  Even so, we still find ourselves owning many objects which remind us of our past adventures.  Photographs, of course, are wonderful in provoking memories and we have albums of these stored in the bottom of one of our bookshelves. And, without looking too hard around our lounge room, I note that there are a couple of exotic blue Japanese vases and other reminders of our many trips to Asia and there is a bowl of beautiful shells collected from a beach in the southern part of the Philippines.  Somewhere we have a Russian doll purchased in Vladivostok, an unframed mandala from Pokhara, and a scarf in my family’s tartan bought on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.

When we’re with friends, we tend to resist talking about where we have been. Perhaps it’s shyness on our part, or perhaps it’s that we don’t want to be seen to be flaunting our good fortune in having been able to see places that others haven’t. Having said that, we are certainly not reticent in talking about our adventures if the opportunity presents itself and our audience is not too reluctant to listen.

Looking around at the souvenirs that I have gathered over the years, though, I realise that even the most evocative of them will rarely attract the attention of a visitor and it is unlikely that any will be a conversation-starter for an anecdote.

The souvenir that I have sitting on my desk as I write these words is a stone - a pebble - less than 4cm long and 3 wide, roughly egg-shaped.  It’s a metamorphic rock, mostly grey with brownish patches and an indistinct strip of pinkish material through the middle.  It has clearly been collected from a beach or riverbank as it has been worn smooth by many years of being rolled around in water with other rocks.  I’ve had it for more than 70 years and, in all that time, when it has been on my desk or elsewhere on display, no one has ever picked it up to comment on it or to ask what it represents.

If anyone had ever noticed this pebble, I might have told them its history.  It was picked up from a beach in a small fishing village called Johnshaven in NE Scotland.  I was there with my mother and my brother visiting my father’s family before travelling to Australia to start our new lives.  The weather was sunny and I decided that I wanted to swim in the ocean.  It was, in fact, the North Sea, and I had no idea how cold it would be.  There was no sand on the beach; it was just a mass of water-worn rocks, large and small, and I can still recall the sound of the rocks as they clattered together through the action of the waves.

With my bare feet, I tip-toed carefully over the rocks and allowed the water to creep up my legs until the waves came past my knees and touched the hem of my swimming costume.  Bravely, I splashed some water up over my chest and hurried back to the beach where my mother wrapped me in a towel until my teeth stopped chattering.  I picked up this rock from the beach as a souvenir.

The word ‘souvenir’ is French and means ‘to remember’.  That tiny rock certainly fulfils its purpose in helping me relive that otherwise forgettable event.