Features and blogging

One of the upsides of lockdown has been not having anyone over. I mean this in an apologetic way because of course I’ve missed seeing friends and family very much, but a ban on hosting has come at the most convenient time. Over the last few months we emptied out my in-laws’ worldly belongings into our two-bedroom apartment, on top of the remnants of my parents’ home, and 101 years’ worth (our combined ages) of gubbins from numerous former dwellings.
As a result it’s pretty full in here, like a scene out of #hoarders. Picking through the rubble every so often in an exhausted attempt to find space, we keep tripping over family relics. Like this plate, created for my grandparents’ gold wedding anniversary in 1982.
Whoever came up with the idea of a symbol for each family member didn’t reckon on the tricky task of actually appointing one. I remember we all had to give it a bit of thought. Back then mine was a no-brainer, I held the paintbrush of course, but I find this at odds with the 2021 me. Ask me how long I've known I wanted to write and I’ll tell you: all my life. But there I was, nearly 13 and already on a straight trajectory to art school, which indeed is where I ended up.
I took the art route because it made sense at the time, but always held a nagging feeling that I should have read English. Sure enough, four years of printmaking resulted in me chucking the squeegee in the bin and picking up a keyboard for good. All of which goes back to that time-honoured question: how on earth should we know what we want to do when we’re 12?
This is a format quite particular to our UK education system. In a week where I’m watching my 16-year-old tick off subjects every day that he will never have to look at again, I'm happy and sad all at once. YAY to the last ever English paper, a subject he's never been a fan of. But wait, does that mean an end to the bonkers stories I keep finding as I sort out his old schoolbooks? No, they’ll always emerge, just not in essay form.
Hooray for the end of Biology! But didn’t he always love foraging with Grandpa (himself a biology teacher)? Yes, and he always will, it’s just that he won’t have to write up the findings. And those two will always go off foraging, repeat to fade.
For some people on that plate the symbols have stayed the same, for some they’ve changed radically. My sister is not a vet, yet her icon was a cat. Yes she loves cats but so far they haven’t featured in her career. I guess there’s still time. Mum had a quill because she was a writer yet, like me, she started out at art school.
My cousin was given a screwdriver because he was an engineering student, yet for the last 30 years he’s been living in France teaching English to teenagers my son’s age at the local high school. Qui savait? Get to the other cousin and see the ski symbol (he absolutely wasn’t a ski instructor) and it eventually dawns that these are hobbies not careers, but even so – these things were defining us all.
So what symbol will I give my son? His teachers would suggest a calculator, a computer mouse or a piano. He’d probably choose a gaming console. If he’s anything like me, he’ll end up being a little bit of everything. Let’s see.
PS if you don’t mind the mess you are more than welcome, just bring a bag and take some stuff away.