CONNECTIONS
Introduction
I put much importance on the stories that belong to things, objects, utensils, decorative items, furniture, and artifacts generally that I live with. I need them to be part of my life and to this end I have made it my purpose to add, use or simply live with 'things', their mini-histories complement my everyday existence especially objects that connect me with people I have been close to or have known. By so doing the objects themselves take on a life and importance of their own thus rendering them something other than pure objects and keeping the people they are associated with living about me. They live on with me and become an undying part of our lives and so I write, when I do so by hand, with my father-in-laws fountain pen. I drink, daily from my Dad’s ‘Grandad’ mug, I use my cousins little wooden box to store my bling in at night and I wear, everyday, my Aunt’s pendant Celtic cross necklace. I wear one of my Uncle’s old woollen jumpers over my shirt when working in the winter garden. These 'things' I have written about in this series are just a few of the hundred’s of everyday items, some small, some large that we live with, all deliberately accumulated and in some cases rescued to enrich our home and our lives with their connections and stories.
This is not pure nostalgia either. There is a romantic nostalgia about my views but I do not reject that. Nostalgic is often used in the pejorative sense as "living in the past" and of course it can a negative force be but for me it takes the past into the future carrying with it memories and times with people we treasured who are now dead but live on in the 'things' they left behind.
Most of these connections are small, a salvaged picture frame, a mug or two but some, those that are most important to me, have an interest that is worth recording. These stories present in turn these few special things and their connections. Together they embody my views, some of which are expressed above, on the relevance and value of 'things'. Objects, properly treasured, are crossing points in the matrix of our personal universes, their interstices (albeit many of them dark and mainly unknown) being the lives that originated them or possessed them. Each of these stories is connected to each and form a thread, one of my threads in this "vast similitude". (all PDFs to download)
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