All I was doing was swapping over the contents of my handbag. I didn’t expect that half an hour later I’d be sitting here thinking about my past, present and future self – well, selves really. But it’s surprising where you can find little pockets of time, artifacts from your personal history that are striking and memorable just because they are just so very mundane yet precious.

I’ve been carrying around a small black faux-leather rucksack for a while now. It wasn’t expensive – I don’t go in for designer bags or anything like that because I’m hard on them and it’s a waste of money. This wasn’t just a bag for carrying my purse and phone and perfume to work, I’ve taken after my mother and seem to carry everything with me all the time. Also, this poor thing had spent last holiday pressed into duty, and had been stuffed to bursting with a summer day trip’s worth of essentials: two types of suntan cream, bottles of water, two phones, camera, notebook, iPod, PDA, pens… No wonder it was starting to come apart at the seams, and one strap was just on the verge of coming away.

I’d planned to go into town at the weekend and replace it, but this evening I was sorting out Jef’s bag for roleplaying from the cupboard under the stairs, and an old bag of mine fell out. It was the slightly bigger sister to the one I was looking to replace – same shape, same handles, fewer nifty loops and pockets, but in perfect condition and it would certainly do as a stand-in for the time being, saving me a shopping trip. After Jef had left for the evening, I settled down on the stairs (where both bags seemed to have ended up, the closest dumping ground to the cupboard, I guess) and started to swap the contents over. I can’t for the life of me remember why I’d abandoned Old Bag, but I hadn’t bothered to empty it out when I hid it away at the back of the cupboard, and it still held a slew of receipts, tickets, old batteries, pens, lost 10 and 20p coins. The typical bottom-of-the-handbag rubbish, in other words. I emptied everything out, and transferred my new stuff in. I’d got a carrier bag to use as a make-shift bin-liner and started going through the bits to throw them away. Ever since I accidentally through away an uncashed check when clearing out an over-stuffed purse, I always check each and every piece of paper now.

First I found a cassette – a home recorded one, unlabelled and unmarked. That made me smile – so, I’d not used this since the days when I never went anywhere without a walkman? That dates it. It was dated even more accurately with the next find – a ticket to see Reign of Fire on June 26th, 2002. 2002, eh?

(I’ve dug out my old ghetto blaster, let’s see what’s on the tape…. oh my GOD! It’s a bootleg I made of a Cranes concert! This is ANCIENT! I’m not sure if this was Bristol or Portsmouth but it was from 2000… hee, The first track is… Everywhere! Oh, and you can hear the audience talking all over it!)

There’s an admission pass to the National Space Centre, dated August 10th 2002 – I’d forgotten that I must have had both of these. It was from a day out with my parents, and my one has been sitting on the side of my desk since then, a kind of talisman and reminder of that day, which became painfully significant in retrospect because it was the last time I saw my Dad before he went in for his heart bypass operation. On the day, we all knew that the op was ahead of him, but thought it would be several months away. He got a lucky last minute cancellation slot not three weeks after that day out. He’s fine, he made it through the operation and he’s now healthy and happy, but at the time the weight of that day, and knowing that that could have been The Last Day… it pressed heavily on me. I’ve kept the ticket since, as well as a couple of postcards from the day that sit next to my computer at work, as a kind of touchstone for things not being as bad as they could have been, and a reminder to make the most of every single time I see someone I love – just in case.

I then found a little locket on a fine silver chain hiding in the corner of the front pocket – Mum gave this to me when I was about 14, it’s silver and of a Victorian style, with a tiny posy of pressed flowers caught in resin. Only about the size of my thumbnail. Inside are pictures of my teenage idols, grainy photocopies of cuttings from the NME I think, trimmed with painstaking care to fit the tiny space. I doubt anyone but me would recognise the two people in the pictures. It makes my heart ache to see them, more from the care I’d lavished on something secret and precious than anything else.

(The sound on this tape isn’t bad actually. I’m tending towards thinking it was the Bristol gig.)

In the bottom, along with till slips from Tesco and memos from my first job at the OU is a receipt for a £20 deposit from Denham’s Jewellers in Leicester, dated December 11th 2001. For a moment, I can’t remember what that was for, and then it comes back. It was the deposit that I put down on the commitment ring I bought for Jef – we’d only
been together since November 16th, seems amazing to think of that now, but we wanted something matching to wear, a symbol. I bought his and he bought mine: it was just a deposit on his because it needed to be custom set. We both still wear them to this day.

It’s not all ancient goods. There’s a little green bag from Silveraki in MK centre, containing a single silver stud earring – a tiny cat’s face. Jef’s I remember buying it and tucking it away in my bag – and then must have forgotten all about it. It’s been sitting here waiting all along.

Just a little clutch of treasures, but quite a hoard among stuff that I was just about to throw away. Things I’ve not thought about for years and years but they’ve kind of shaken me out of my day to day mentality and made me look at a woman who isn’t me any more, one who bought these things, who went to that concert, who signed the deposit for that ring. The girl who carefully cut out photocopied pictures to make something to carry close to her heart.

I feel like I miss myself, but at the same time I feel closer to me than I have done for a long time.

(Ah. It’s actually the Cranes and Mogwai set from the Cure at Hyde Park. Ah )