A Humble Spirituality

I started repairing and re-covering our old dining room chairs today, the first one shown above. We bought these and an old 1930's draw-leaf dining table when we moved into our first flat together, back in 1977. The table we left back in Birmingham, but these four chairs have been with us pretty much ever since. They've been re-covered I don't know how many times, this time with a small bolt of cloth from a charity shop. I was tempted to sand back and oil the old oak frames of these chairs, but refrained when I realised just what that would mean.

When we moved up here to North Wales in 1980, we rented three successive furnished cottages before buying our first house in Gerlan, so our stuff stayed in storage back in Brum. It followed us up on moving into Gerlan Terrace, along with our old gas cooker - a 1950's New World exactly the same as the one my mom and dad had at home when I was growing up, and that cost us the princely sum of £7.00 from the classifieds of The Birmingham Evening Mail when we lived briefly in Smethwick.

Prior to the point that all of our things rejoined us, we'd started sharing meals with friends on a regular basis, each of us cooking for the others in turn - a kind of communal setting for the first year or two we were here - I might add that I was forced to learn to cook at this time: something I'd never done in my life up until the age of twenty-five, and one of the best things I ever learned to do: I still love cooking to this day.

When we first lived in Gerlan, in a small rented place on the hill opposite the site of the former Capel Treflys, we made friends with Alan and Irene, who lived just a few doors up. Competitive cooking soon ensued, and continued for many years, and whilst Alan and Irene still live in the same house, we've moved around a lot over the ensuing decades.

The point of all this is that I realised these four dining chairs have seated dozens of friends and family at countless suppers, lunches and God knows what else, for forty years. The number of hands that have gripped the top rails of these seats when sitting down to eat must be in the thousands by now, each leaving their mark; even their DNA. It's a fascinating and sobering thought: so many of the people that have sat on these humble old things and shared our food with us are now no longer here; you could almost say that our history is written into them: a kind of domestic memento mori. So, the raised oak grain and patina stays, then. Here's to the next dinner party.