If you bury your memories, make sure they are sealed up
My motivation for vacuuming the house is that I get to keep
any money I find.
Granted it’s never that much, but the odd fifty cent piece
pays for an ice cream every now and then. I also have the same policy when
getting the washing out of the machine. Any stray coins in the drain hole are
mine.
It’s also a great feeling to unearth something from the
depths of the sofa and the same feeling applies to when you find a hidden
treasure in the garden. There are stories of people finding gold coins, wedding
rings attached to carrots and maybe an ancient standing stone that was covered
over by accident when the house was built. My sister in law found a buried WW2
bomb shelter in her garden which was a bit of a surprise.
Of course most of us don’t really find anything other than
an old rusty garden trowel, which in a way might be a good thing. If I think
about what I’ve buried in gardens in the past then these items are best left
untouched. I’ve lost count of the number of pets that have gone into the
ground. There was a survey done by Primrose not too long ago and found 44% of
people have buried cats and dogs, birds, rabbits and fish take up 26% and a
worrying 27% of people surveyed said the things the bury in the garden are
‘Undisclosed’
Other things people bury range from a piano frame, letters
to their future selves, broken baths, bananas to ward off verruca’s to an old
hard drive and even the ‘husbands dinner’
I’ve laid a few other things to rest over the years other
than the family pets. When I was pre-teen I had a bit of a thing for burying
Action Men in the garden. It’s no doubt an indication of my adolescent state of
mind as I tended to torture them first with fire and then seal them up in
plastic. Die cast cars and plastic soldiers got the same treatment and are no
doubt still in their resting places. I’m sure there’s a Netflix series in there
somewhere.
As I got a bit older (not much) I then resorted to burying packs
of Number 10 cigarettes in our local park on the way home from school so my
mother wouldn’t find them on me when I got home for my tea. I’d dig them up
again in the morning on the way to the bus stop and take up the back seat of
the double decker puffing away like crazy until getting to school then
repeating the same thing on the way home.
Only 4% of people asked in the survey buried time capsules
for their children and grandchildren. It’s probably the equivalent of
bookmarking something on the computer now but putting together time capsules
used to be very exciting events. I remember the fuss and fanfare when Blue
Peter buried their tin of historical items back in 1971. John Noakes Valerie
Singleton and Peter Pervis put in photos of themselves along with some tapes
and decimal coins. It was dug up recently and nothing had survived the damp and
microbes.
There have been a couple buried since and hopefully they learned to
seal the containers with more than Sellotape. The middle box contained such
treasures as hairs from Goldie the Blue Peter Labrador, a record of the
programme's theme tune arranged by Mike Oldfield and video footage of the
moving of Petra's statue who was the shows first pet dog from 1962 (to 1977).
The last capsule buried in 1998 is called the Millennium
Time Capsule. As well as containing Blue Peter items including a badge and history
of the programme, the capsule also contains a set of Teletubby dolls, an
insulin pen and a France '98 football. The time capsule will be opened in 2050.
If you can’t wait that long until it’s unveiled I’m sure you’ll find some
images to look at on your phone.
There are stories of people finding complete cars, loaded guns;
hand grenades even planes in their garden but as the Blue Peter capsules show,
most things are reclaimed pretty quickly when buried into the earth, unless
it’s plastic that just gets smaller and smaller until it enters the food chain.
Everything you dig up in the garden will have a story behind
it. If you find an old scorched Action Man with its elasticated limbs dislodged
wrapped in plastic, spare a thought for the angst of childhood.
