PIck your precious 3- from my memory box

                     

I opened my Memory Box last month, to search for a story for Sian's Pick Your Precious Storytelling blog hop which takes place on the first Sunday of the month. The stories are often moving, sometimes funny and always inspiring so I recommend that you pour yourself a cup of tea and head over there. But read mine first while you're here!

10 years ago,I culled my Memory Box quite ruthlessly when  I was moving house and pregnant with R.  Items which had been important through my teenage years had lost relevance and I knew that I was about the embark on a whole new set of memories. Although I was not a scrapbooker then, I must have already had a scrapbooker's mentality because I based my choices of what to keep on what I would want to show my children when they grew up. So the things in there are consciously precious, not just randomly saved.

Here is a selection some of the things I found:

 A collection of Royal Mail First Day Covers. The earliest was for the Queen's 25th Jubilee in 1977 and the oldest is 1981 - Prince Charles' wedding to Diana. They are not all royal. There is one about Guiding and Scouting, a ballet dancer and various animal ones and famous people. They are probably fairly worthless now, but might be collectable by the time M inherits them. I kept them more for historical interest. The cover price of the earliest stamp was 8 1/2p, compared with 50p today!

These champagne corks were from the children's christening parties and my wedding. I had never come across this tradition of putting a coin in the corks until I met P.

These 2 swimming badges from primary school were kept because they were my only ever sporting awards (until I got my orange belt in karate in 2011) I threw away the badges between 25 m and 500m, but kept the highest two. I am an OK swimmer, it is once of the sports I can do, but I am not fast. In my final year of primary school we went to the public swimming pool once a week by coach.  We got exactly 45 minutes in the water and then had to get changed at lightening speed to get back to school by the end of the school day. We did distance badges at regular intervals, the highest award being 1500m. I was proud of my 800m but on the day I was due to try for my 1500m I was nervous. This was twice as far as I had ever swum.

However,  I was determined and there was a lot of peer pressure to succeed. I don't remember how many laps we had to swim, but I do remember a teacher telling me to hurry up  because I only had 10 minutes before I needed to get changed. There was no way I was going to cvomplete the laps in time but I battled on regardless until the teacher literally had to pull me out of the water. I was gutted. Everyone else had achieved the required number of laps. I hadn't. And the badges were to be given out in school assembly on Friday. I cried with frustration all the way back to school on the coach.

In Friday's assembly I sat with my head down as my friends went up to collect their badges. Then my name was called. What? But I hadn't swum 1500m. Puzzled, I stood and went up to the front of the school hall. The teachers had located a 1000m badge! We didn't know that distance existed, but they said I had achieved it. I maintained, and still maintain today that I could have swum 1500m if I'd had enough time!