When my grandmother moved house, we found tins of fruit in her pantry that were produced in countries that no longer actually exist. Peaches from Yugoslavia, raspberries from Czechoslovakia, I dare say we could have found custard powder dating back to Pangaea had we looked long enough.
So, it was with a familiar sense of food history that I found this packet of mints in my coat pocket this morning:
Check out those bad boys. I haven’t seen a packet of Trebor mints with that typography for… well… since… actually, I’ve never seen a packet of Trebor mints like this in my life. Because at the time that these mints were for sale in shops I was probably still teething on a home-made Rusk (yeah, my mum was all over that No Logo shizzle when Naomi Klein was still in Osh Kosh B’gosh).
This kind of discovery is one of the archaelogical pleasures of buying second hand clothes. Particularly of buying second hand clothes from volunteer-run charity shops in small towns where the average age is about sixty three. Which is precisely what I did, when I bought this sweet BHS waxed jacket from my granny’s nearest town. Check out the label:
In my life the nearest I come to Hitchcockian tension is that knife-edge moment when I first open my bag after carrying soup in to work for lunch and the first time I plunge a hand in to the pocket of some recently acquired second hand garment. There have been tissues, shopping lists, sweet wrappers, even the odd photo. Like a slightly more musty-smelling and cheaper David Starkey, I can begin to patch together a historical impression of how the previous wearer lived. In this case I inferred that; they appreciated a good waxed jacket; they were far cleverer than me, as I had been wearing this jacket for about three weeks and only discovered the arm-height pocket; that they probably went for the sort of long walks where a Trebor extra strong mint can be the only thing standing between you and full diabetic halitosis.
So, you waxed-jacket wearing, tweed-clad, side-parted, brogue-shuffling, hand-knitted Hackney farmers check this out for vintage. My coat eats mints older than your house:
Nell Frizzell
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