Great British Escapades: Worthless Junk

Wednesday 13 April 2016

Worthless Junk

Memory Board or Worthless Junk?

We're just back from 4 nights away at one of our favourite spots in Scotland. Tucked away in the far south west corner lies Luce Bay and, towards the end of Luce Bay you'll find New England Bay. Because it's a large rambling campsite wifi is hard to come by and because it's around 20 miles south of Stranraer, it's not exactly awash with mobile phone signal either, making it the perfect place to escape to when you need a few days R&R.

The campsite is pretty much on the beach so, as you sit outside the van sipping wine in the evening, all you can hear is the lapping of the waves and the plaintive call of the curlew. Unless, like us, you visit in April when the only things you can hear as you sip your wine huddled up inside the van is the howling wind and the rain thundering on the roof.

To be fair Sunday was glorious though VERY windy and we still got out and about the rest of the time, we just took our waterproofs.

Anyway, all those long evenings sat inside gave me chance to ponder our memories board - or "worthless junk" board as some people may call it. When we acquired Delores just over 6 years ago the first thing I added was a pin board so we could track our anticipated adventures. It looked pretty empty for the first year or so but now is chock full of odd mementos from the many places we've visited. There are tickets for a boat tour of Orkney from last summer, a wrist band from the zipwire at the Eden Project in 2014, and a parrot picture, bought at the Pencil Museum in Keswick and coloured in during an enormous storm in 2013 near Bakewell.

Latest addition

None of it has any commercial value and I'm pretty sure very little of it has any aesthetic value but to us it all has huge sentimental value. We've been through a lot in that van. It's not overstepping the mark to say she changed our lives (it was while we were on an extended tour that we decided to change our lives completely and move to Cumbria and she was home to us for 3 months when we first came up here - and yes, she's a she.)

Whenever I shuffle off this mortal coil whoever clears out my stuff will waste no time at all shoving it all in the bin, and I don't blame them one bit - the memories are ours and the junk only means something to us. Photos are all well and good but they spend most of their time hidden in a file on a computer, whereas our memory board is there to peruse in the evenings as the van rocks gently to and fro in the passing gale.

Memories are free but, perhaps it's my age, it's so easy to forget something we've done or a place we visited and an odd little keepsake brings it all back. We never pay much for our trinkets - this weekend's addition cost us £1 and most of the other stuff is ticket stubs or cut out bits of tourist leaflets - so in a society that seems obsessed with value for money I'd say we were doing pretty well. (Are we alone? Do you collect "worthless junk" too? Maybe it is just me...)

Oh - and if you're wondering what else we got up to this weekend...