My Time Capsule in Hot town, summery in the city - 2017

There’s this podcast I listen to with the above title. It’s by Michael Fenton Stevens. You may not know the name but if you saw the face you’d know him (certainly in British TV)

The premise is to think of five things to put in a Time Capsule: four things you love and one thing you want to banish from your/the world. The time capsule is of an indeterminate size and can fit thoughts, ideas, memories, concepts as well as actual things. He usually interviews other actors or comics that he has previously worked with in television and theatre.

While careening around the town on our little bus this morning it crossed my mind that I would write mine.

I’m going to start with the crappy item to banish for life.

The scary thing is there’s so much to choose from!

(1) i would like to remove divisions between people. The divisions created by covid and politics as well as the divisions between everyone due to differences. The divisions are usually created because of a lack of understanding or recognition of that other person. I think that encapsulates everything that I would put in this category. If that happened there would be far less need for mental health support (which in the U.K. is greatly lacking). Oh, and alongside this would be the phrase, “restore my faith in humanity”. What a huge pile of bunkum! The vast majority of people in the world are good people, your faith doesn’t need to be restored you fuckwit!

And that is why I did the negative one first, so we can then move on to a positive swing.

(2) I spent four years living in London in the late 90s. I lived with, and then near to, my older sister, first in Teddington and then in Isleworth (this, despite being in London, must be said in a Yorkshire accent and the ‘s’ is vocalised). I have so many happy memories of those four years. Years in which I was finding and falling in love with me before meeting the person I would fall in love with forever. I think it’s so important to fall in love with oneself (in whatever way that is for you) before it’s possible to fully love and accept love. It was a very diverse time of my life with kayaking, cycling, partying, acting. Just so much going on in my life. But the thing I remember with the most happiness was playing games with my sister in her living room in Teddington. Especially Jenga. My sister had a set that had been made for her by a friend who had cut up a long piece of wood and sanded the sides and corners. It lived in a little box. Sometimes we would be laughing so much that we couldn’t move the pieces out of the tower, and we discovered how far you could make that tower wobble without it falling. Usually there was a CD on in the background and the lamps in the Victorian living room lighting it beautifully. My sister and I became so close at that time.

So my first item in the capsule is the jenga game that my sister bought for me. I can see it at the moment on the book shelf by the dining table. It now has one smaller brick after we lost one and had to replace it with from from an inferior set. My kids used it as building blocks: roads, steps, houses etc and we have played it as a family so often. The most recent being T and myself last week. Each brick now has a number on it and there’s a sheet of paper with questions linking to the numbers which my husband did for a meeting at his work several years ago. We still use the questions now!

(3) I have the most amazing pillow. It’s a cheap-as-chips V pillow from Argos which I bought 17 years ago when I was pregnant with T. I used it in bed to support my belly and I used it after she was born while breastfeeding her, wrapping it around my belly and lying her on it. It is the most incredibly soft pillow, it never goes flat, puffing back out as soon as you’ve finished with it. It’s the closest I can get to an imagined cloud as well as having those gorgeous memories of dark, exhausted feeds in the first year of T’s life. I won’t share a picture of my pillow as it is 17 years old and despite its cleanliness it is rather stained. This is a modern day one for sale in Argos. It costs twice as much as it did 17 years ago and awful!! I bought some for the family a few years ago and they all flattened utterly within six months!!

(4) The apple orchard. I was very fortunate growing up, having an idyllic childhood. At the bottom of our garden was an apple orchard. It’s still there but only has one tree now. Depending on the time of year and weather the orchard had many different personalities.

In the Summer the nubs of apple were growing. They were cookers but we always tried to eat a few, pulling faces and throwing the rejected fruit in the nettles. Oh yes, there were nettles all the way around the edge of the orchard and in summer we all, at one time or another, came a cropper to the nettles. Several of the trees grew at a severe angle because of the best route to climb them. We spent a lot of time up the trees and jumping out of them, pretending to be Wonder Woman.

During heavy rain the orchard would flood. Running along behind the orchard was an overflow channel for our town’s river. The river was a large, swirling mass of muddy brown whirlpools. Only one person on record has ever gone in it and come out alive. His rescuer didn’t make it though. And the town sits slightly below sea level. So any flooding of the river causes massive flooding in the town. The water channel was built to alleviate the flooding and, in doing a bit of surface research, it seems it was built in the 1300s (although that’s just how far the etymology goes back) and when the river is at risk of flooding, the sluice gate is opened and the water goes into the channel. It then rises up through the ground of the gardens that are built along it (the oldest houses are probably a little over 100 years old, my dad’s is 90 years). The areas of the gardens that flood are lower down than the rest so no threat to the house.

Looking out of the window and seeing that the orchard was flooded was always a moment of excitement. It was usually wellies and coats since it usually flooded in winter but we would go straight out after breakfast, paddling in the water and just enjoying the moments, the time spent splashing. Then one time it flooded in the middle of summer. There were no wellies, no coats. We put on our swimming cossies, splashed in there bare footed and felt the grass and mud squelch beneath our feet. The water was warm and we swam and jumped out of the trees, we splashed and played. The neighbour boys brought their old, leaky canoe over and we all piled in, water filling the hull as we sank deeper into the water. I must admit, I panicked quite a bit!

Then one year it flooded just before a big freeze. The whole orchard was an ice rink. It lifted up around the trunk of each tree and it buckled the fence between our orchard and the one next door, making the rink twice the size as we went straight over the top. We had had a rocking ‘horse’ (more donkey than anything) and had long since removed the metal rocker, attaching wood to it to make a sledge so we pulled each other around on it, falling and laughing.

That was also the year that we walked into town along the frozen-over water channel. My mum loved anything that was different, out of the ordinary etc. this was an adventure for us all, including my mum. Can you imagine doing that now though?!

In the late 70s we bought a rubber dinghy while on holiday in the Lake District. We brought it home and used to go up and down the water channel in it. I was the person in it when it was discovered to have a leak (although everyone thinks it was my sister since I had snuck out that morning without permission and never ‘fessed up 🤣 letting my sister go through what I had just to avoid getting into trouble!!). The whole dinghy started getting floppy, both ends sticking up in the air as I sunk lower in the middle. I couldn’t swim at the time which was why I hadn’t been permitted to use it alone so I had to battle the water weeds and drag it to the bank, haul myself and the dinghy out, put it away and sneak into the house. To this day I’m sure my mum knew but let me learn the lesson my own way!

This is a Google Earth picture of the orchard now, with its one tree.

So number 4 would be the orchard with all its memories as though on a cine film.

(5) I’m struggling to come up with a number five, it feels too finite and as though too many other things may be missed.

I think I’m going to go with our local little park. This park is just around the corner from our house and was one of the reasons we bought a house in this area, although we didn’t have children then. We knew we would. I often run past this park and I see so many images of my children doing different things there. T sitting, proud as punch, on the top of the house. Both kids in the house, looking out of the windows. Pretending the bottom of the house was an ice cream shop. I remember T learning to swing on the swings and a boy I used to look after trying to run after spinning around in the little yellow spinny bucket chair thing. Spoiler alert, he fell flat on his face! The children running around and me running between pushing children on swings and catching them off the massive drop-off at the end of the slide 🤣 again, I would want the memories, captured in a cine film stylee.

And that is my Time Capsule done, my five things chosen.

What would your five things be?

Last updated August 11, 2022