Antique Values

You poor take courage
You rich take care
This earth was made a common treasury
For everyone to share

from The World Turned Upside Down - Billy Bragg

A little bit of history, a little bit of radical politics, a little bit of folk music, a little bit of nostalgia for our children singing around camp fires when the world was young and full of hope. A song that pushes a lot of my buttons

My first memory of the table is 'helping' my mum prepare food on it - vegetables, cakes, cheese sandwiches, lemon meringue pie (make sure the capsule of lemon flavour dissolves), packets of shortcrust pastry, Christmas pudding. We didn't really have worksurfaces, just this table and another one, even smaller. It also had a blanket and a sheet thrown over it and became an ironing table, dealing with bed linen; starched, detachable collars; trousers with turn-ups

It has a drawer in it, held closed by a metal catch that opens and closes by rotating a T-shaped bit of metal, which fascinated me. The draw held the 'sharp' knives: the bread knife, the meat-knife for cutting thin slices of ham or pork off the bone, also the 'steel' - the ridged metal bar with a fancy handle, that was used for knife-sharpening. And there was a two-pronged, sharp-pointed meat fork, with a hinged rod that pulled out at a 90° angle to the shaft, to protect the hand holding the fork from a slip of the knife

When my mum died, nearly 40 years ago, the table came to us. It has been a kitchen table, a dining table, a homework table. A space has always been found somewhere. At one point we had it refurbished. It has been with our daughter and s-i-l for a few years, but it is farmhouse-scale furniture in a city terrace, and there isn't room for it and a grandson under the same roof. He will grow up with different memories

There is not much of the politics of Billy Bragg or the Diggers or the camp-fire songs of our children's summer camps left in our national conversation at the moment. Buying and selling 'the earth for private gain' is all the rage. I yearn for someone who would turn the tables