Found Objects

I was very late in acquiring a mobile phone. First, we got one free with our bank account, which we shared (the person on the train had the phone to call home when the train was late). Then, my father-in-law gave me his old one, which broke down after a few months. I’d gotten used to it, so I bought just about the cheapest I could get.

A few years later all my daughters were buying phones, and the screen of mine was getting a bit dim and the battery tired, so I got this Nokia 2600 because I loved the way it looked and I could get it with a prepaid SIM card from a decent provider.

There are much more spiffy phones on the market now, and I’m not sure whether I want to stay with Nokia now they’ve sold their soul to the devil, but I still think this is the perfect shape for a phone.

This is labelled (1) because I intend to post more: every time it occurs to me, a picture of an object I like and the story behind it.

My grandfather made this for my mother when she married in 1954. I inherited it in 1998. The two spoons on the left came with the rack, as well as the two spoons-with-a-hole in the back row on the right (one pointed, one round). It’s clear that I don’t use the spoons-with-a-hole as much as the rest; only for cake batter (so slightly more lately) and some sauces. I bought the three round spoons on the right in the front row when I moved out of my parents’ house in 1979. The two oval spoons (third from left in the front row and the one behind it) I bought to fill up the rack because most of my mother’s spoons smelt too much of cigarette smoke and I had to throw them away.

It’s always been on my mother’s wall and on my wall, except for a few years in the house before the last when we had no place to put it. It wasn’t easy to hang it up: these tiles sit on a sheet of wall-finishing board on top of what felt like drywall to the drill, which is half an inch or so in front of a sixteenth-century wall I didn’t want to touch. So I had to drill very carefully, swapping drill bits twice: the crack between the tiles was soft, the wall-finishing board tough, the drywall soft again. But it’s now firmly on my kitchen wall, where it belongs.