Magpies and bottles.

I spent a very odd Sunday exploring the Alton Bottle Fair. I think, ultimately, that weird events like this couldn't be held anywhere else other than Britain. I've never heard of bottle digging and collecting taking place in any other part of the world.


Basically the only way to get hold of these bottles first-hand is to dig them out of old tips, so it was essentially a fair of stuff the Victorians threw out: old medicine bottles, cold cream jar lids, chipped crockery, ancient thermometers....

There were also some incredibly creepy porcelain dolls' heads in a silk-lined box. The very same ones were on sale last year. I don't know what possible use anyone could have for them, but there they are, carefully packaged and priced, and creating a fair amount of glances.

My mum collects Victorian bottles, and when the recreation ground opposite our house was dug up to install the foundations for some skate ramps, I remember watching the turf being peeled back to reveal thousands and thosands of glittering lumps of bottle. We must have collected hundreds, far more than we would ever have been able to fit in my mum's cabinet or into our house. As kids, we thought we were digging up precious gems, just because they glittered and came out of the ground.

For the most part, the people at the bottle fair were acting the same. There were bottles for over two hundred pounds. It's very curious to me, this side of human nature. Collecting. Victorian bottles are old rubbish, but the reverence attached to them is no different to the reverence some attach to Faberge eggs, Steiff bears, Marvel comics or gold coins. It's just magpies, magpies, magpies, however you look at it. Buying things because they're like other things.

But we're not a bunch of Zen Buddhists sitting on rice mats and pooh-poohing anything material. Things, especially things from the past, are connections to other people. We don't make our mark on the world just through love and kindness: it's undeniable that we create and accumulate more Stuff then we should whilst we're on this planet - but it has to be admitted that some of this stuff is pretty incredible. Appreciating Old Stuff is appreciating the creation off this stuff, the work and thought which went into it, the people who made it and the world which it existed at the time.

I'm going to indulgently post one of my favourite bits of any book, ever. You should all read Riddley Walker if y'haven't. This bit is Riddley, in his post-nuclear-holocaust world, coming across some of our stuff:

“I hispert back, "O, what we ben! And what we come to!" Boath of us were siffling and snuffling then. Me looking at them jynt machines, and him lissening to their sylents. Right then I didnt know where I wer with any thing becaws all on a sudden I wernt seeing any thing from where I seen it befor... Now all the sudden Eusa and Eusas head and the little shyning man had becom some thing woaly diifrnt in my mynd to what they were before. How cud any 1 not want to get that shining power from back way back? How cud any 1 not want to be like them what had boats in the air and picters on the winds? How cud any 1 not want to see them shyning weals terning?”