Sunday afternoon and I’m alone at caravan HQ in West Cornwall.
July is treating us to a free taster of November’s weather. Rain splatters against the caravan windows and tree branches scratch on the roof in the wind.
looking around for something to do I eye up a random selection of objects on a shelf that could do with a tidy, and it’s started me thinking about what I’ll describe for now as the magic of Things…
There’s a vintage mask on the shelf in the long abstract shape of a wolf’s head. Simply carved from a single piece of wood and with huge, human-like, painted-on eyes, I’m not sure but I think it’s Guatemalan. Two ancient glazed pots from the kilns of Khmer (now Cambodia), they’re over eight hundred years old, from the time of the great temples of Ankor Wat, ( perhaps the worlds most ambitious funerary complex?), – they reckon it took 300000 workers and 6000 elephants 30 years to build that place… Beside the pots is a photo of my dad taken in 1980’s NewYork, posing on uncle Billy’s Harley Davidson. The photo leans next to an antique Yoruba pipe bowl, finely carved as an ancestor figure, with its hands resting on its spectacular pot-belly.
The sky outside is gunmetal grey and the caravan creaks in the wind. This has all the makings of a pretty miserable weekend;
except that it it doesn’t really,
– because here I am in the warm & dry, suddenly wondering about the incredible medieval kingdoms of Cambodia and how I must try to see the Mekong river one day…
and now I’m googling Guatemalan masks and realizing it’s maybe Mexican, and that’s another place I’d love to visit…
of course I’d have to try to catch the Dia De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations, which suddenly reminds me of my Uncle Ryan’s funeral a couple of years ago and what an amazing day that was, and how there were Zulu drums playing outside his flat in Clapham to honour his roots and making it feel like carnival, – And then I wonder if he would have liked the Yoruba pipe bowl…? – apparently one of his numerous business ventures was importing traditional African art to sell in Brixton…
and so it goes on….
the very tip of the ice-burg of what I’m going to call the magic of things….
This is one of the beauties of being in the antiques business. You get to surround yourself with a thousand wonderous objects from the four corners of the world. Objects that set off a whole cascade of thoughts and questions, imaginings and memories whenever you look at them. Objects that you can ‘store’ on your shelves & mantel piece (because there’s never enough storage space for the best stuff in the lock-up) objects to re-arrange, research for hours, and become just a little bit obsessed with….
And then when you’re broke and the car needs fixing, or it’s time for that big fair you’ve been buying for since last year, you take down some of those pieces you’ve been loving as if they were your own, and you finally take them to market.
Of course there’s always going to be a few things that manage to stick around,…
an antique copper Yak bell with the voice of the high lonely mountains.
an old carved flying spirit-frog with bats wings (because how could you not keep that?),
or a 19th century clay catfish with a broken tail and the face of a muddy-river angel….
Trading in old things means that almost everything has been crafted by hand.
Somebody went and dug the clay for that catfish out from a river bank in a South Indian village in the 1800s. They sat and carefully shaped it, right down to the individual scales, they must have been pleased with how the face turned out….
Then they dried it in the sun, and maybe someone else in their little workshop painted it, and took it to the marketplace, and sold it to a customer, who took it home to place on a household shrine, until it got knocked off one day by one of the kids messing about and broke it’s tail off….
Every single small thing has it’s own story,
each piece of stone, or copper, or wood, or weaving,
so many careful hands, so many journeys, so many small prayers,
no wonder these things have magic in them.