Monkey business!

This cheeky monkey was bought from my lighthouse man! (See other blogs). He's pretty old I think n is beautifully jointed with beady glass eyes. I am tempted to hold onto him! Talking about monkeys, I've recently been clearing out our loft which has thirty years worth of memories up there. There were hundreds of cuddly toys, some very special and some bought randomly by my children at school fairs, charity shops etc for twenty pence or so. I have found these characters from the monkey family of various sizes, colours and characters (see below). All this time, there has been a veritable zoo above my head. Some of them are heading to new homes.There must have been a secret loft world which I have now disturbed. Baby clothes, toys, games, tins, as well as pure rubbish, if rubbish can ever be pure! I don't think so, considering how dirty I am when I come out after a session cleaning up there! It's amazing how much we keep. Often the things we keep are really beautiful items worth holding onto for future generations. My daughter's baby has inherited some of her mummy's clothes, even her christening robe as well as lots of great toys from the eighties! I have photos of both of them wearing the same things thirty years apart! However, there are things which I think, why on earth have they been kept!! An old pair of trainers?? Two old pillows? A broken football game where the spinning teams have no pitch to play on as it was used as a stepladder until someone's foot went through it! Why you may be wondering, did I hold onto these things? Well, your guess is as good as mine. One positive thing though is that my and other people's hoarding instincts protects items which will become our collectables of the future. When I sell a lovely old tin, I wonder where it came from and why someone held onto for all these years so that I could find it and then pass it on to someone else. I do often wonder in this minimalist age, where will all the collectables of the future come from? So at least when I'm despairing as I trail through my loft treasures/trash, I can feel some justification in holding onto things so that they may one day be someone else's treasure bought from a stall just like mine. I think part of the problem is that it's hard to treasure something which is so common at the moment such as all the big Roses, Quality Street tins which abound around Christmas time. Even I have thrown quite a few of these out after using many of them to store pens, nails, candles etc and exhaustingly ran out of ideas for any more uses. But perhaps in forty/fifty years time when they're a bit bashed and maybe tin isn't used anymore as a material, those very same tins will be fawned over by young people. You just never know!!!

They're escaping from the attic!!!