Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
Great pleasure can be had from owning things. I’ve often been accused of magpie behaviour, as in collecting large numbers of things and ending up having to make pathways to get from room to room. It’s not like those TV programmes about people who can’t throw anything away, or obsessive collectors, you understand, but it is bad enough to make tidy-housers wince. They believe in bare rooms and clean, bare surfaces. Surely, the only purpose of surfaces is to put things on?
There’s a question often asked during pointless interviews with slightly famous people that fill columns in Sunday supplements fairly cheaply. “If your house was burning, what would you grab before you got out?” Inevitably people think of their photo albums. Or their dog. Nowadays, of course, people don’t have photo albums, so I suppose it might change to the mobile phone or the hard drive. If you keep all your photos on the Cloud, of course, you wouldn’t have to think about rescuing anything.
Who knows what the tide may bring?
Thankfully, house fires are rare nowadays, although the possibility of disaster is still there, round a corner or hiding behind a tree. There’s a quote that I love from one of my favourite movies – Where the Heart Is – which goes like this: “We all know that our lives can change with our next breath.” And that’s balanced by a quote from another favourite film – Cast Away. “The sun will rise in the morning. Who knows what the tide may bring?”
It’s an interesting idea, though, to play a small game with yourself, to make a list of your ten favourite things. There are no rules, except for the rules I’m just making up. Like all my columns, I’m writing stream-of-consciousnessly, so I have no idea what’s coming next. The rules of this game are going to appear as follows:
The Rules of the Game
- No sentient beings allowed. We’ll assume that all pets are safe. You can pick plants if you like
- Thou shalt not give any weight to the actual monetary value of any of thy possessions
- You don’t need to worry about size or weight. You won’t be carrying everything
- You don’t need to struggle if you can’t think of ten things
- You don’t need to take any notice of this or any other rules
- There are no rules
When you’ve assembled your list, you’re entitled to spend some time thinking about each of these items and remind yourself of how pleased you are that you have them. And that’s the point of the exercise. I’m willing to bet that each one has special significance to you, and there’s a lot of emotional stuff invested in it. The objects in themselves may not be special to anyone else, but they mean everything to you.
Deposits you’ve made in the Emotion Bank
What I’m trying to say in my usual cack-handed way is that the most important things in our lives are our feelings. The objects you just listed are precious to you in a way that can’t be quantified. They’re like deposits you’ve made in the Emotion Bank, and I’m saying that the stronger and warmer your emotions are, the richer you are. And your affection for favourite possessions is as nothing compared to your feelings for those that are close to you.
I’ve been trying to make my own list, and it’s surprisingly hard. The first thing that came to mind is a pencil pot made from bamboo. It isn’t much of a thing, probably ten centimetres across, made from the bottom of a large piece of bamboo, so the joint is the base. There’s a scene etched into the outer layer and coloured, a standard Chinese scene from a probably mythical past, and I have no idea whether it’s worth anything or not. I can’t even remember where I got it from, but it has a lot to do with my childhood, and jumble sales, and my mother.
The most beautiful object my young mind had ever seen
There’s another thing that comes to my mind. It’s a Corgi Toy, dated sometime in the early Sixties, looked at in the toy shop window on the way to school and back every day, and finally bought with several weeks-worth of pocket money. It’s a gunmetal grey Jaguar E Type with a removable hardtop and red interior. It was the most beautiful object my young mind had ever seen, and it’s probably still in my top ten beautiful things (see a possible future column).
It had independent suspension and bounced in a thoroughly satisfying way when you dropped it on its wheels. I cherished it and kept it in its box and never crashed it, and I never stopped loving it even though I still managed to crack the windshield. When I grew older I cast aside all my childhood things, as one does, but my dad kept it and all my other cars in a basket in his shed until I was a father myself, and just handed it to me one day. That was a moment and a half. They’re in a cabinet now, the E Type in pride of place. That’s the whole of my childhood there, and a lot of how I hoped to be as a dad myself.
We love them uncritically for what they are
Objects like these represent the best of us, because we love them uncritically for what they are, even if they’re old and beaten up and cracked and showing the ravages of age. If we’re lucky, we have people around us who we love unambiguously, and if we’re very lucky, they love us, in exactly the same way.
And if we’re even luckier still, we’ll have discovered that we can love ourselves too, in just the same way that we love those favourite things and people.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
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