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October 24, 2004 05:24 PM

The Time Machine

I’ve spent the best part of today out at my Grandma’s house with my family, helping to sort through the extraordinary assortment of items she carefully folded, sorted and stored in plastic bags over her long lifetime. Pictured above are but two of well over fifty teatowels brought home from travels in Europe in the mid-1970s, infused with the overpowering smell of camphor from the linen press, but otherwise remaining entirely as they were at the time of purchase. Other items included eleven themoses (not a typo), numerous pewter beer steins (always useful for the teetotaler), some forty souvenir teaspoons from Australian country towns, and - remarkably - a mint-condition original pressing of Good Vibrations.

I couldn’t help but think that if John and Janette had been turfed out of The Lodge (or, in fact, Kirribilli) a couple of weeks ago, they would’ve felt right at home among the bakelite in Blackburn.