During the course of a sort-out in my garage I have encountered many objects unseen for years ...but so familiar. A ten-year sojourn in the garage had not improved their condition. The family Bible was beyond redemption and went to the Council rubbish dump ...now modishly dubbed a "Recycling Centre". So too my grandparents' carving set in its disintegrating case. I think I saw it used once or twice to carve "the bird" at Christmas when I was a boy, but by then it had become a kind of gentility token rather than an everyday working tool. With a stab of guilt I tossed them into the skip, to join all the discarded kitchen units, old microwaves and broken computer monitors which had preceded them.
But some things you just can't throw away. While I was growing up and far beyond, this electric iron stood at the ready on "the marble table" in our kitchen. We never owned an ironing-board. When it was necessary to press one of my aertex vests or a pair of flannel trousers my mother spread out a special twice-folded ancestral blanket, plugged in the detachable "flex" and did the ironing on the table-top. I think I heard her say that this was my father's de-mob iron ...that is to say it was issued to him along with other essentials of civilian life when he was demobilised from the army in 1946. Like most things that are made for the armed forces it was robust and durable. It gave faultless service well into the 1980s and even when replaced was still working. Unfortunately the maker's name has worn off the plate on the base. In the background is its predecessor, a pre-electrical model, known simply as "the flat", that had been my grandmother's. This, of course, had to be heated over the "the gas". They might make good doorstops I suppose.

This afternoon, I walked to my parents’ house, because my car is acting up again. I was about to make the curve on Watson Road, when I stumbled across these four Polaroids, scattered on the ground, in a seven-odd-foot area. They are arranged (clockwise, from top left) in the order that I found them. Finding the one with the ketchup was pretty funny, because I thought that it was blood for a moment. The ketchup bottle totally ruined that idea, though.
Anyway, here’s the obvious. Three of the four (the two kitchen ones and the ketchup one) were taken in the same house (look at the tiling), and I’m also going to assume that the bathroom one was taken at the same house, too. They’re not vintage pictures, because the appliances in the top left picture are no more than eight or ten years old. The fixtures and décor in the house are definitely old, though. And the house is at least somewhat local - Merita only sells bread in the southeast.
I believe that these are “evidence pictures”, of the disorder that the house is in. But WHY were these taken?
Was the house broken into? The bread in the sink, and the ketchup, is obviously food waste. Maybe the person who did the destroying was simply doing it in revenge - not stealing things, but simply making the house a mess. Or maybe an angry tenant did this, right before they shot the moon, leaving all of their belongings (including a piano and sofa) - and the landlord snapped these, as evidence of the disorder they left - or, in the case of the bathroom picture, just to prove that they left stuff.
There’s a lot of questions, but none of them will probably ever be definitely answered. But it’s still quite fun to look at them and wonder what happened.