I was really struggling to think of what to write about for E, so much so that I gave up yesterday, and was pretty close to deciding to give up for today too. I kept thinking of words that STARTED with E, but I was hardly inspired to write on the topics... Not that I can honestly say this is going to be an inspired or inspiring post, but at least I'm keeping up with the challenge, right?
So I got home from work this afternoon and I was completely exhausted, so I sat on the sofa and stared at the tv for a while, and after a particularly dodgy Western, Flog It came on. I'm not really a fan, but it's a nice, safe thing to watch while your brain snoozes away inside your head, and I do like seeing the various antiques (possibly a familiar feeling of comfort from when I was a child and my parents watched Antiques Roadshow every single time it was on...) Anyway, (there is a point to this, I'm not just listing what I watched on tv today) the word "estimate" was of course used about fifteen hundred times, so many times, at least, that it eventually filtered down into my snoozing brain which recognised it as a word starting with E, and I thought I would write about my continual astonishment at the things people are happy, eager even, to get rid of.
It's the same on all these antiques shows. People will bring along their lovely collection of personal family photos from the late 1800s, or a vase that's been in the family for five generations, or a porcelain dog their little old mum really loved, and then agree to put it to auction for like, a small handful of tenners. Oh, your great grandma gave you this necklace especially because she thought you would like it and that was the last time you saw her before she sadly passed away? Yep. Hmm, well I reckon it's worth about £30 quid. Great! Let's sell it!
Ok, obviously some of the things people bring in are just an old bit of rubbish they found in a charity shop and now want rid of, and some of the people absolutely hate the stuff they've brought, in which case, well, it's kind of fair enough, but so many of them come with amazing personal stories, and I just don't know how people can want to swap them for a bit of money! Even the antiques experts used to occasionally try and persuade people to keep what they had brought in, but they seem to have become cynical in the face of the endless amounts of people who just don't value the things that have been passed down to them, and given up now.
I know that stuff is just stuff, I'd be the first to say it - but at the same time I suppose I'm also a very sentimental person, and I would never sell something that had been passed down in the family and come to me. Especially old photos, that mean nothing to anyone else anyway! Keeping things that belonged to someone doesn't bring them back, and you don't need those things to remember them, but how can the fact that it meant something to that person mean nothing to you?
I don't know, everyone's different I guess, and I tend toward sentimentalist and all out soppy things like keeping an object as a token of someone I care about anyway, but I just find something pretty distasteful in selling off something hundreds of years old that your granddad collected for a few quid toward your new kitchen worktop. I wonder if they ever see themselves on the show when it's repeated years later and regret not keeping the things they casually got rid of?
No comments:
Post a Comment