Cartophiles, Arctophiles, and Unicorns

My husband has been kept very busy recently with moving our business premises during the last couple of months. That sounds like a long time but it involves moving our antiques showroom and combining it with our container packing department next door. There are a number of reasons for this and one is that as Bob Dylan many years ago declared: The Times They Are A-Changing. The days have passed when we had casual members of the public come wandering in looking for a kitchen table. Now they are scrolling through antiques sites on the internet and that is where sales are coming from. So the need for a decoratively pleasing look is redundant in a warehouse situation. We all have to move with the times.

 

There has been loads of rubbish from our business relocation, taken to the tip because when you have plenty of space, you gather much more than you need and keep everything you might one day find a use for. In addition to all this, another problem is that both my husband and I are seriously afflicted by nasty cases of Cartophilia. We had shelves of maps in our warehouse office. Not helped by both being guilty of this. We love to travel and therefore, we love maps. This was even evident when we first ran off with each other about forty years ago, when we lived in a room over the very first Body Shop in Gardener Street, Brighton. Our first decorating operation there, was to paper the entire stair well area with a complete set of bombing practice maps of the UK from WWII. We gather maps all the time and from everywhere. Those shelves of maps will have to become boxes of maps for a while but neither of us will want to throw any of them away. Many of them are not current which makes then just as endearing. We have a six foot map of the USA on our turbo room wall: Yes, we have a turbo room, though some might call it the box room.

 

 Whilst I am in confessional, I am also an Arctophile which means that our home has bears all over the place, I have been thinking about giving one away here and there before I pop my clogs and they all get thrown in a black poly bag and taken to the charity shop. The giving away thing has not happen yet.

 

 

 

Here we have Big Ed wearing Steve's old school cap and a badge saying he has completed Offa's Dyke Path. He has a dislocated arm that needs attention. The big guy here is fifty year old Shorn, who is our tri club mascot and is wearing trunks and a running vest with an Ironman medal. Shorn was my daughters bear before he got into sport.

 

We have completed a number of long walks, The Pennine Way, West Highland High Way, Offa’s Dyke Path that has nothing to do with gay women but is an ancient border path between England and Wales. We have trodden some of the Coastal Path, South Downs Way of course because its so close to us, and many holiday walks in Switzerland, Austria and even the Michigan Upper Peninsula in the USA. The Camino de Santiago; The Way of St. James is looking closer than the horizon and may be on the five year plan, or closer than that for the 800 kilometres of Northern Spain…. That has to be done. It has to be. I can’t help it. There are walking routes from many places to Santiago de Compostela; we even noticed the pilgrim shell symbol on the pavement in Gdynia, Poland on our recent trip there.

 

 

Polar Bear here is well over sixty and has had a pretty cushy life, hence the wry smile. 

This morning, Steve had given me a list of business emails to send out and had then gone downstairs. Ploughing through my jobs I had a question and went downstairs to asked Steve about one of my jobs of the day. I found him standing by the kitchen sink, wiping a sponge gently at the face of a polar bear soft toy from his own childhood. He quickly put it down as I went in, saying that it had got quite dusty in the showroom, where it had been part of the décor for years. After he left for work this morning I cleaned Polar Bear nicely and he is now sitting in the sun drying.

 

 

Mister Whoppit is a signed and numbered (2819 of 5000) copy of speed ace Donald Campbell's mascot who survived that fatal crash on Coniston Water in 1967.

Dreamers yes, but we are dreamers who have worked to fulfil as many of our dreams as possible in the short time life offers. Not all of those who wander are lost.