Vintage, pre-loved or just old?

Aah, vintage and retro...

When did second-hand shops become vintage emporia? Or bric-a-brac become kitsch and retro? Sometimes it seems to me that if you label something vintage or retro not only do you lend it an air of coolness that it wouldn’t otherwise have, you can also double it’s price on eBay!

You can't have too many sit on giraffes!

When I was growing up in the sixties, there was real pressure to buy everything new. If you couldn’t afford it, you used Hire Purchase to get the latest TV or sofa, and proudly showed it off to your neighbours. Admittedly many of us now use credit cards and buy now pay later schemes to furnish ourselves with the latest gizmos or home furnishings, but there has been a real shift, especially amongst millennials, to look back to simpler times and embrace vintage and retro in a way that lots of us blue rinsers never have.

My Mum loved a good jumble sale. Many of our clothes, as children, were second-hand and our toys ‘pre-loved’. We had a family tricycle that would be used by one sibling, then repainted to be presented to its next proud owner on their birthday. To be fair I don't think we ever realised, and we loved that trike. It had a boot and everything!

What's not to love?

I never really did embrace the second hand clothes though - especially when I proudly showed off my ‘new' shoes in the playground and said they'd come from a jumble sale. I endured jibes about being dirty and poor for weeks after that. I swore that, if I ever had children, they would always have brand spanking new clothes / toys / everything!

Oh, Beth loves kitsch catties!

How ironic is it, then, that my daughter loves nothing better than rummaging through a charity shop or car boot sale! She seems to have inherited many of my Mum’s genes, including cat collecting, gardening and the love of a bargain! For my Mum, with four young children to clothe and feed, secondhand clothes and toys were a necessity, but for Beth it is different. She loves the quirky things that appear in charity shops - she’s even been known to rescue items from charity shop bins, for goodness sake! She adores anything seventies, and has furnished and accessorised her home accordingly, with an eclectic mix of styles that just seem to work. If something isn't ‘cool’ it doesn't cross her threshold!

'I want everything in this window!'

When Beth comes home, her favourite place to visit is Vintage Mischief, in Beccles. Now, while I have been slightly disparaging about vintage shops, I can honestly say that this one is amazing. It has a real sense of style and some of the things it sells are design classics. 

Design classic candleholders - thank you
Vintage Mischief  (and hubby!)

However, whenever we visit, I do spend lots of my time saying, ‘We had one of those…Nanny had those cups…Brian’s Mum had that ornament.’ If only we’d realised - we could have flooded the market and made a mint! 

This was probably ours!

I was so excited when I saw a water container exactly the same as the one we had in the beach hut, and in that moment I was transported to a happy place, remembering glorious family times.

Such happy times!

So maybe that’s the point of vintage, retro, secondhand, pre-loved. Even if it doesn’t evoke personal memories, it gives you a sense of the past, imagining what an object’s life was like. Harking back to simpler times, where the World didn’t seem so scary (to be fair, it probably was, we just weren’t as connected to it) and summers were always sunny. Yet again, my daughter has got it just about right!

You can't have too many vintage gnomes, either!

Lost and Found...

So, one of our cats went missing. We were eating dinner on Tuesday evening when we realised that no one had seen him since Monday afternoon. Now Mo will quite often disappear for hours at a time, but not usually overnight, so we were puzzled and a bit concerned, but fully expected him to be there the following morning…but he wasn’t. 

We checked the shed, garage, spare rooms but no sign. Me, being me, decided he had drowned in a nearby dyke while trying to catch a frog. My husband thought he’d got into an open vehicle, his favourite thing to do, after catching frogs, and been driven off to goodness knows where. My son, on the other hand, was convinced that he’d crawled into one of the sewage pipes being laid nearby, and been sealed into a hideous fate! Suffice to say that we were all really unsettled by his absence. Every time the phone rang I expected it to be the vet saying a dead cat had been brought in and his microchip said it was ours - and sod’s law demands that we had more cold calls yesterday than in the past six weeks!

The power of the Book of Face!

By the afternoon I started to get really upset and posted a photo on Facebook, asking for help to find him. Then I started to cry and found it very difficult to stop. Every sad emoji that my friends posted started me off again until my eyes looked like peeled tomatoes. All of this over a cat. Okay, a very cute cat, but still a cat.

The thing that disturbed us the most was not knowing what had happened - was he lying dead somewhere or, worse injured and unable to get home? Was he locked in a garage that may not be opened for weeks? Had he been catnapped / shot / poisoned? Its amazing what your imagination can do to fill a void of uncertainty if you let it. All of us felt in limbo. Every time our other cat walked past the window we jumped and we were constantly expecting to see a black and white body under a hedge. My son felt sick, and even my appetite was unusually absent.

I'm home!

Then, at a little after 10pm, in he marched! Miaowing, demanding food and drink as if nothing has happened! He was very thirsty, and I suspect he’d been shut in somewhere but, other than that, he was fine. He ate some food, had a drink and went straight out again! Obviously not as traumatised as us!

Just before Mo walked in, we had been watching the news about the terrible Grenfell Tower fire in London. There were people being interviewed who were desperately searching for their families who lived in the tower block and hadn't heard from them all day. It put worrying about a cat into sharp perspective. Whole families were missing - brothers, sisters, parents, children. Horrible. Hopefully most of these people will be found safe and well in the various emergency centres, but undoubtedly some will have perished in the blaze. Again, terrible, but a definite, if tragic outcome. 

Every year in Britain there are thousands of people reported missing - over 130,000 in 2015-16. Whilst most of these people return home very quickly, 2% go missing for more than a week - that’s 2600 people! How do their families cope? Living with the dichotomy of hoping for the best and bracing themselves for the worst. I simply can’t imagine what that is like.

Real people, not just statistics...

Anybody who saw the recent Britain’s Got Talent can’t fail to have been moved by the Missing Person’s Choir - a group of people with missing family members, using a public forum to get their message out there in the hope of some new information. Seeing their photographs projected while the choir sung turned them from being statistic into being someone's child or parent.

I wrote recently about picking up the pieces of your life after the loss of a loved one (It's Okay to Laugh,too), but I am in awe of those people who have suffered a bereavement but not a death and yet carry on with their lives. I couldn't focus on anything yesterday, and it was just my cat that was missing. Enduring that feeling of uncertainty for any length of time over a family member or close friend is unimaginable. If you have time, check out the Missing People website, type in your area and have a look at the photos - maybe you have seen one of these people and could help reunite them with their family. How amazing it would be to help someone enjoy an 'I'm home' moment.

Only letting him out on a lead from now on!

It's Okay to Laugh, too...

So difficult to write

This time three weeks ago I was writing my brother-in-law’s eulogy. I still don’t know why I offered to deliver it - as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to suck them back in - but it was something I felt I wanted / needed to do for my lovely sister and her children. When I was writing it, people said to me, ‘Don’t forget the funny bits’ which seemed at odds with what I was trying to say. We were saying goodbye to someone we loved, continue to love, and there’s nothing remotely amusing about that. But the truth is Rod was funny - sometimes intentionally, sometimes not so much - and writing about his life needed to reflect that. So I included some ‘funny bits’ and people laughed. In the midst of a sad and solemn occasion, people laughed about him setting a dead tropical fish in plastic resin and pushing a brush down the chimney because it got stuck going up, covering the house in soot in the process. Later, at the ‘party’ as his youngest granddaughter called it, we continued to laugh at our memories of a man who always put his family first. The human spirit at its finest. 

How do we do that? We just carry on, going to bed, waking up, eating, drinking, laughing, regardless of how we feel inside. I remember a really surreal moment the day my dad died, standing in the fish and chip shop at lunch time. My dad had died less than twelve hours ago, and we were buying fish and chips. But, we needed to eat, and nobody felt like cooking…needs must! I remember my mum saying the exact same thing as my sister is saying - ‘I’ll be alright’ - and it’s true. In the face of bereavement, loss, tragedy, people are, in the main, alright. There’s no alternative really, other than curling up in a ball and dying yourself, but the human spirit prevails and we carry on with our lives as best we can. Yes, we are sad at times and anniversaries  and special days may be sadder than others, but we shrug them off and find that we can actually enjoy ourselves again. The trick is not to feel guilty about it.

Never feel guilty for having fun!

Events in Manchester and London over the past couple of weeks have shown people’s ability to rise above tragedy and show that life carries on - the coming together of thousands of individuals for the concert in Manchester on Sunday, the man who tried to return to pay his bill at the Borough Market restaurant he’d eaten at on Saturday night and the countless millions carrying on with their daily lives, metaphorically giving the finger to those extremists who would try to disrupt our society with fear and hatred. Humour is the best antidote - how funny that one of the heroes of Saturday night, injured trying to protect others, was given a magazine in hospital, ‘Learn  to Run’ - hilarious!

The best example of the human spirit

The human spirit - a truly marvellous phenomenon. I have written before about how it is okay to be sad(here), but we also need to remember that, whatever life presents us with, it’s also okay to laugh!

My daughter and her friends certainly know how to laugh!

Physical wellbeing = emotional wellbeing!

I’ve been ‘blog-shamed’. Last night my husband asked whether I had written a post in May, as he thought he’d missed one. Immediately on the defensive, I muttered something about having nothing to say, and then spent all night tossing and turning, wondering why.

So ashamed...

The truth is that a family bereavement and an ongoing knee injury resulted in the month of May being a funny old time in the Land of the Blue Rinse. Both emotional and physical pain have left me feeling disconnected, out of kilter and completely discombobulated. (Love that word - try using it in a sentence!) I fully intend to write about our family’s loss at a later date, but in truth it’s my physical incapacity that has impacted in ways that have surprised even me. I have blogged about my body being ‘Fit for Purpose’, but in the past two months this hasn't been the case. I’ve been completely incapacitated at times, needed crutches and serious painkillers and barely left the house.

Surprisingly painful to use!

Needless to say, tennis is not possible, and, although things are slowly improving, I’m still awaiting an accurate diagnosis and suitable treatment. 
The aspect of all of this that has surprised me the most is the effect this has had on my mental well-being and emotional state. Not only have I stopped doing the things I am unable to do, I haven’t done anything that I can still do. Instead of using my time reading, sewing, blogging, I have retreated into watching rubbish telly, playing Candy Crush and obsessively reading about how sh*t Donald Trump is. Not healthy, really not healthy. I have shied away from meeting up with friends, put on weight and have felt demotivated about just about everything. Not Neighbours though, still love Neighbours! 

So bad, it's good!

The point is that physical activity and mental health are inextricably linked. I love thrashing about on a tennis court, whether I win or lose. 

Oh how I miss holding you...

It’s the one form of exercise that engages me completely and I would happily play every day if I could. Digging in the garden gives me a sense of strength and youthfulness (!) and I always feel as if I really deserve the reward of a bath  and a g&t afterwards. A walk with my husband or friends relaxes and reinvigorates me. I sleep better and worry less. 

All of these things have been unavailable to me of late, and I’ve really felt it. Hence, no blogging - I couldn't see the point. Hopefully this is a relatively short-lived   episode, and I will return to a level of fitness that allows me to return to the things I love which, in turn, will lead to a more general sense of wellbeing. All being well, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible!

Stupid knackered leg!

I appreciate that, in the grand scheme of things my wellbeing is not that important to anyone except my family and friends, which is why part of me feels this post is absurd. No-one caught up in events in Manchester or London gives a flying f*ck about what I think. On the other hand, if we stop doing what we do, on even the smallest level then the terrorist haters win and, demotivated or not, I don't think we should let that happen.