I’ve completed my keepsake for the upcoming exhibition.
As amateurish as it may look, it feels like the first thing I’ve truly done from the heart.
Growing up in Melton Mowbray in the 1980s, I visited my Nanna most weekends. She would ply me with sweets and leave me in front of her old black and white Ferguson TV while preparing meat and three veg with broad beans and peas we’d picked from the garden, tinned baby carrots and extremely buttery mashed potato followed by trifle or sugary ground rice. Or Richmond sausages, chips and beans.
If it was a Saturday, Grandstand would be on and I’d watch the videprinter show the football results, hoping that there would be 8 score draws to maximise the pools winnings. I don’t remember her ever actually winning anything but she always said she’d spend her entire winnings on her family if she had a big win.
We watched so many quiz shows in the 1980s and I loved them with their revolving sets, shapes lighting up in different ways to signify who was winning. Bullseye was a favourite, as were The Price Is Right, Bob’s Full House, Blankety Blank and Every Second Counts. I wanted them to skip past the cheesy introductions and comedy routines and get on with the game, so that I could watch the electronic boards lighting up in different combinations. Nanna and I would discuss each contestant’s chance based on the lie of the scoreboard.
When I visited her in later years I still felt that watching quiz shows together was a way we could really connect.
She died in 2001. After her funeral I asked if I could take two small mementoes: an award she’d won playing bowls, and a little pirate mug that she had kept on her fireplace in every home she’d lived in. More than anything else, I felt this encapsulated my memory of her.
My keepsake echoes these quiz shows. The Toby jug inside is displaced. I wonder how my Nanna would feel welcomed in today’s society, where towns and cities undergo social cleansing and so many people can’t afford to live where they grew up. I also feel displaced from my origins – having lived in so many towns and, largely through luck, transcended the borders of class firmly into middledom. To have been given so much love from someone who wasn’t even my “real” grandma but treated me as if she was, fills me with a lot of warm memories.
