On the upside, I found the Kenwood ice cream maker

[kaberett]

On the downside, however, it was purchased in 2002 -- the Woolworths receipt stapled to the distractions advertises the release of The Two Towers -- and is its own standalone device, i.e. very much not the attachment my mother remembers Mama using while she was an undergraduate.

Which -- given the nature of the house -- means there's at least one more ice cream maker somewhere, in addition to today's finds of yet another Kenwood Chef chassis (this one complete with bowl and mixing attachments, hidden behind the stack of disused breadmakers), a coffee grinder, a fourth mincer, and a mysterious thing I know not what.

This is particularly disturbing because I've now gone through as much of the cellar as I'm going to prior to the clearance firm arriving (there is, for example, categorically no way I'm investigating the locked wardrobe that's wedged along a piece of wall behind a wine rack that has been bolted to said wall) and it's... not there. (I was briefly excited by the two potato peelers, previously mentioned, because "a glorified bowl lined with sandpaper and a stirring device similarly coated" has superficial similarities to "a freezable metal bowl and miscellaneous churn", but nope!)

Maybe it's in the freezer that is just getting taken away as-is because No? Maybe it's somewhere under the rafters? Maybe it's in the garage, somewhere, horribile dictu?

Either way, the clearance folk arrive on Thursday morning, and on Thursday morning I will turn into my grandfather: I shall become a wretched little gremlin insisting on poking through every single container they try to remove from the property in the course of the job of work they've been hired to do, in case any of said containers contains something precious.

But then again I did, earlier and at my mother's direction, find on top of the ridiculous wardrobe in the hall, in a nest of dust and spiders and pristine LPs, Papa's commission. And great-grandpa's commission. Signed by the actual respectively relevant kings. Which Papa had sworn blind were Probably In The Attic, and had been keen for us to find, and to be fair the attic would have been A MUCH MORE SENSIBLE PLACE TO PUT THEM but THERE YOU GO, Papa, THERE YOU GO.

Comments

[rmc28]

Ok, right, so to set the scene, my maternal grandparents moved from Manchester to a nice bungalow in a seaside town the north Welsh coast when my grandfather retired from being a minister. Sadly, as is often the case with men who stop suddenly after working hard for years, he died of a heart attack about six months later. I was about four at the time and my next sibling was about a year old.

My grandmother lived for nearly another twenty years in this town they'd picked out, moving after a while from the bungalow to a smaller flat, and later again to a single room in an Abbeyfield house. Eventually she died of cancer (a few other things had a go first, but she was stubborn), considerately doing so just after everyone had got home from my aunt's silver wedding celebrations. So, there is a funeral, and my mother and aunt do the clearing out of her room, and mostly manage not to fall out, and agree that they will fix a date to scatter their mother's ashes together. They are both really busy so this takes a month or two, but eventually she rings up the crematorium to arrange collection of Mrs Moffat's ashes.

"And will you also be collecting Mr Moffat's ashes at the same time, madam?" asks the person at the other end.

After a bit of bafflement and conversation, they establish that none of my grandmother, my mother or my aunt remembered to actually collect my grandfather's ashes after his funeral. But it was the same crematorium and they'd kept them safely and their record-keeping was good enough to put the two together, even after twenty years.

[kaberett]

This is stunningly beautiful and I thank you.