This little Christmas-tree angel is older than I am. I think my parents got it the first Christmas after they were married, in 1954.

There’s also a glass house that’s still from my parents’ decorations, but I forgot to take a picture of that. Next year…

I should have taken the picture from the other side, I see now, because that’s stamped “Made in Czechoslovakia”. I don’t know if these things are being made in Czechia (or in Slovakia) these days. It does date it; this is an indestructible cast-iron meat grinder. I used it to grind a kilo of meat for the pork pie, but it’s also perfect for dried fruit when I want to make fruit jerky in Lent.

And still people are surprised that I don’t have a food processor. I should be telling them that I process my own food.

And I liked it so much. It used to be my board for pungent things like onions and ginger and garlic and hot peppers, so the other chopping boards wouldn’t reek of it. In the old house it fell between the fridge and the cupboard and I couldn’t reach it until we moved, but when I had it again I realised how much I had missed it. That was the only time it saw the inside of the dishwasher (and three coats of sunflower oil to get it back into shape).

And then it was worn through. Gah. We have a large round board made of hardwood so it doesn’t retain smells, so that’s what I use now, but it’s not ideal, and I think I’ll look for another small rectangular wooden board. Perhaps later this afternoon in the Queen’s Day market, come to think of it. Secunda bought me a round wooden board there last year.

ETA: Nope. Though I did buy a dark blue backpack for one euro to replace the green backpack.

My father-in-law gave me a 32 cm Scanpan frying pan, I think it’s this one, and it’s having its maiden flight right now making bliny.

I’m at about 50 (of 100 promised, likely to come out more) and I love the pan already. For one thing, it’s so large that I can fit in twice as many. And it goes on the wok burner! Also, it’s got some kind of heat-transfer technology in the bottom so it gets hot very evenly and stays at the right temperature— bliny isn’t the hot and hectic job it was last year and all years before.

I had this old green cloth handbag, and a few weeks ago the shoulder-strap snapped clean off, unmendable (or at least not mendable without extensive, expensive and visible trickery). I’d been wanting a new one anyway — I have another handbag more suitable than the old green one, black and with secret and super-secret compartments, but it’s got a wonky zipper and having that replaced would cost as much as a completely new one.

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I have a froggy bank!

A birthday present from Prima. I’d seen a similar one in a shop and told her I liked it. This one is prettier! I especially like the ladybird on the frog prince’s front. I think I’ll call him Frederick.

This means that Tertia can have the piggy bank back that I had on semi-permanent loan. (She’s called Rosalie.)

All my presents at breakfast were green:

Left to right: new milk mug from Secunda (both of my favourite mugs broke within a fortnight of each other), Prince Frederick, aloe vera face cream from Tertia. My other half’s present wasn’t suitable for the breakfast table: it’s black and lacy.

ETA: amusingly, most of my shopping turned out to be green too. As is my bag, and also (not in the picture because I was wearing it) my coat.

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.