Sraps and fragments

I've just been taking some old fibreglass insulation out of our loft, which we're going to have re-insulated. We could just have had the new insulation laid on top of the old stuff, but the insulation that was already there looked pretty disgusting, being covered in a decades-old layer of black dust, so I decided to take it out. It was mucky job and I ended up covered in dust, cobwebs and grime, but it was worth it to clean the place up.

Whilst stripping out the old stuff I kept coming across little scraps of discarded paper, a fragmentary record of the lives of those who have lived here before. I liked the unintentionally hilarious cover of the 1960 DIY magazine I found, (shown above), with a firm-jawed chap sawing away, his wife in the background putting up partition walls whilst tottering about in stiletto heels and a pencil skirt.

There was a child's vaccination record from around 1960, recording vaccinations for whooping cough, polio and the like. There were pages from of a correspondence course in "Scientific Salesmanship" from the early 1960's (associated correspondence suggests that this course may have resulted in somebody landing a £1,000-a-year sales job with company car, although this may have just been a puff piece by the people running the correspondence course, rather than an actual letter). There were unsent Christmas cards, a recipe magazine, a bloodthirsty child's comic-strip magazine called Warlord, with a Tiger tank advancing menacingly from the cover, more DIY magazines and some pages furtively torn from a copy of The Perfumed Garden.

Philip Larkin thought that "what will survive of us is love." Maybe. Or maybe, only rustling scraps of ephemera will survive, feeble scraps of what we once were:

Come let us now consider the generations of man,
Compound of dust and clay, strengthless,
Tentative, passing away as leaves in autumn
Pass, shadows, wingless, forlorn,
Phantoms, deathbound, a dream.

Aristophanes