A keeper of things

14th June 2025

My father was very “handy”, always an engineer he would always have a go at fixing this, making that, dismantling the other to see if it could be used for something. This started at an early age.

The contents of the garage were fascinating and horrifying in equal measures. Lengths of wood (various sizes), screws, brackets, bolts, clamps, levers, 1/2 used rock solid fillers, glues and sealants. I hear his voice “I might find a use for that at some point” I get it. However a large jar of “used batteries” ???? I’m sure he was saving them for a special trip to the dump. He loved going to the dump. We too have found it attractive in recent weeks. Very satisfying.

Amongst all those useful things, was also more history. There is a lot I need to process but when you think about keeping stuff it’s incredible that we have found in the back of a cupboard, stuffed to the gunwales, in the garage, my great grandmothers diaries.. These diaries are well travelled. They would have left Barbados with my Grandmother when her mother died and she relocated to Jamaica. Then in the 1990s they crossed the ocean to come and live in Somerset. When she moved into a residential home six months before she died, my parents emptied her home and filled theirs with her stuff. History does not relate whether there was a conscious decision to keep them or it was a “I’ll get round to that at some point” situation, that never happened. They might not even have known what they were.

Before you wonder … yes I did read them, well flicked through them. They mostly chronicle ordinary daily life in Barbados….. and really have very little of anything I feel I need to keep or even to share with my extended family. Even the entry on the day my “Bumpa” died is perfunctory.

So I ask myself is it an inherited trait? Keeping things. Some people are keepers and some chuckers. I’m definitely in the former group. I’m busy going through my list entitled “Pollards Mill …things to buy in the UK”. Knobs…. I need to buy knobs for the new doors to the Mill. Once we have pressure washed and cleaned the mill we need to stop the monkeys, and the bats using it as a toilet. They need to be weather proof, rust proof and classy. I thought ceramic with sugar cane on them … that has proved impossible, (well despite extensive internet searching I can’t find any I like) and when you think about it sugar cane is actually just grass. Not very pretty. Clink… something in the back of my mind is stirring.

Found in our utility room, I knew they would come in useful sometime. Another thing to cross of the list.