I pulled this old bottle out of the room which is sometimes called 'the office', sometimes 'the box room', sometimes 'the spare room', depending on the state it is in. 'Box room' is a polite way of describing its state right now. I have been intending to clear it out for quite a while, but since the charity shops have been closed for a year and I have not had the heart to bin treasures like this, 'box room' it remains until further notice.
The last person who drank out of it has been dead for quite a while. I was wondering how much of a while and decided that this is a 19th century bottle. Usually one might roughly guess at the age by describing it safely as 'mid nineteenth century', but after I photographed it just now it told me its exact age to the year. When I loaded the photo onto the computer it gave itself the title of IMG 1859. So there we have it. Either the last user communicated from beyond the grave, or the flask itself told me.
When I look at this type of bottle, I am transported back to the sunlit meadow from where the man in the straw hat forsook his deposit and threw it into the nearby river, having drained the last drop of pop the glass amphora would ever hold.
In the intervening years it grew patches of iridescence as the water - aided by the soda flux - began the long process of turning the silica back to the earth from where it came. Soda glass containing soda water. It takes a long time - maybe a little longer than nuclear waste does when it is trapped in glass, or maybe not. Time will tell.
I miss rubbish dumps. I miss the medieval ones - haunted by Red Kites - without the city walls. I miss the ones of my childhood, haunted by the Crows and Gulls which inherited them from the Kites. I reluctantly admit that there are too many of us producing too much uninteresting but dangerous rubbish to have open tips now, but there were always treasures to find in amongst the detritus if you were a child, rich with time to spend on a long, hot Summer day.
I've often wondered what they'll make of our landfill sites in future centuries, and what they'll do with all the toothbrushes.
ReplyDeleteThey will recondition the toothbrushes and resell them.
DeleteWhat a lovely bottle. I am under no illusion as to how hard times were in those days but, ordinary articles were so much nicer than the plastic bottles etc of today. XXXX
ReplyDeleteSo much better.
DeleteI love this. One of our best places to find interesting things is in the walls of the house that we are rehabilitating. We found an old bottle in the walls of a house built in the 1860s and I spent a wonderful afternoon working away dreaming about the hands that last touched it.
ReplyDeleteI have found dead cats, bone dice, child's shoes snd other witchcraft related things in the walls of 17th century houses here.
DeleteWe find old shoes as well! A friend is redoing an old farm house and he found a crawlspace with about 50 shoes in it. They must have been an especially fearful bunch.
DeleteThat's a very pretty bottle. I have always found other people's cast offs (as opposed to actual rubbish) fascinating. All the bits of broken pottery and, joy of joys, the occasional almost whole saucer amongst the rubble of long demolished cottages near to home when I was a kid. They all tell a tale.
ReplyDeleteWhen I hear the term 'cast-offs' I immediately think of my older brother's trousers, so I never use it.
DeleteI think you need to read the book I talk about on my post today - sounds just right for you.
ReplyDeleteI'll have a look Weave.
DeleteDon't we all have a "box room?" With no guests to be had, we've all become a bit lax (except Rachel). That green bottle is a gem. In my town we have a "swap shed". People can put unwanted items in the shed for others to take home (first come first serve). The rule is it must be usable. A friend found an oriental rug and she claims after a good cleaning it is the best rug in her home.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like a good system. I love junk shops - not antique shops, but places where seemingly insignificant things are undervalued.
DeleteI grew up across the street from an "open tip". I lived on North Hill in Akron, Ohio, and on the last street before the hill tumbled precipitously to the valley. The former farm across the street was situated on an enormous sand deposit, which was mined for concrete post WW2, and abandoned when mined out. Now it is fenced off and "reclaimed", but in my childhood it was the neighborhood dump. We collected trash in a can on the back porch, and when told my brothers threw it "over the hill."
ReplyDeleteHowever, these being Depression and WW2 survivors, all that went "over the hill" were tin cans and crockery. Bottles went back to the store for the deposit and old clothing was cut down and down until only a dust rag remained, and then worn to shreds.
A few years ago our municipal rubbish collectors tried to get people to understand that when you 'throw something away' it doesn't disappear altogether. It still exists even when it is out of your sight. China has stopped taking our boatloads of domestic rubbish now so we will have to deal with it as we should have done in the first place.
DeleteFunny man :) 1859 indeed. I binge watched time Team while packing up the last place, and I am in turned fascinated by the dump sites and middens as a source of genuine information about how people lived. Nothing tells the truth like what people discard.
ReplyDeleteWhat this says about our current society is pretty uncomfortable...
An acquaintance of mine owns a whole, early 18th century house in Soho, London. It has a beautifully built cess-pit in the basement and when he excavated it he found a very early cosmetic box in amongst the 280 year-old, desiccated shite. The house had chutes in the rooms which pots were emptied into and he found other articles from a lady's room down there too.
DeleteFunny how shite isn't so intimidating 280 years later! And I want to see this house, I never thing of Soho as having any houses as such.
DeleteLook up 68 Dean Street in Google images to see the house. It's a beauty.
DeleteI see quite a few face masks thrown on the side of the road when I walk, maybe they will be the future treasures of those who will come after us.
ReplyDeleteOur pavements have many face masks strewn about too. They are the detritus of the plague year/s.
DeleteI have been racking my brain about the Victorian dump that was somewhere outside Bath. I think it was up the road past Sham Castle. You wandered down a little valley, and there were bottles of every description.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about that one.
DeleteMy daughter and her husband just had a wonderful time pulling bottles out of the River Dee. I was amazed at the number of them. Colin even found a partial figure that still bore the imprint of the maker's thumb on the inside of it.
ReplyDelete