Watch It

This is an image of my maternal grandfather's pocket watch. It turned up whilst I was clearing stuff in my father's house.

I don't know much about antique watches, but I think I'm safe in my assumption that this one isn't worth anything. It doesn't even work anymore.

My grandfather was not a wealthy man - he kept a small grocer's shop in the south end of Liverpool for many years. He was deadly rivals with "Old Man Tushie" - Rita Tushingham's father, who had a shop on the other side of Whitehedge Road.

The shop belonged to my grandfather's adoptive father and on his death, my grandfather was forced to leave, buying a house nearby, which eventually passed to my father, and is the one that I'm now clearing.

Despite the fact that the house was completely renovated before we moved there, stuff that belonged to my grandfather keeps turning up. For example: I can remember that he had great bundles of pencils advertising brands which have long since ceased to exist, which he brought from the shop and kept in the understairs cupboard. That cupboard was cleared so that we could add a cloakroom sometime around 1980.

Yet there, in my father's desk tidy, the other day I came across a "Golden Stream" pencil. 

[It was a brand of tea, in case you're wondering. I would quite like to know when it disappeared as that would give me a minimum age for these pencils - there are a few of them knocking about.]

This is all part of the spooky afterlife of stuff that I've alluded to before. Things that we own gather round us, then escape, elude and outlive us to fetch up who knows where and when in contexts that we could not conceive of when we had the use of them.

My grandfather could not have imagined that one day I would photograph his watch and post the image on this blog - he passed away long before the Internet age dawned.

So that's my contribution to the Halloween festivities - the image of our future ghosts lurking around our possessions to see where they end up.