Sentimental

My house is in chaos.

Not because I am lazy or because I want it to be, but because a rising damp situation in the living room has made it that way! 

To allow for the builders to do their 'thing' I had to remove every last item from the special place they have lived for the last four years.

It is amazing how much you can accumulate when you don't realise it. Ticket stubs, photographs, newspaper clippings and love letters hidden within the hundreds of books I have lining the wall, (all colour coordinated according to spine colour). I keep telling myself, I am not a hoarder or collector but I am very sentimental person so find it very difficult to let go of lovely and important things.

My favourite item I found was a diary I had managed to write for all of three weeks when I was 7 years old and living in London. I had forgotten my love for Queen and our holiday with our French au pair, but there it was, recorded on yellowing paper within a green hardback notebook with a ginger kitten on the front. I don't remember who bought me the notebook but I remember the sounds of seagulls in the morning on the holiday we were on, strange isn't it. The way our brains choose what information is important enough to store and what we can survive without.

How was I to know that keeping that diary would bring a smile to my face 21 years later.... or that I would be showing my children now 10 years and 6 years! 

I wanted to show my children in the hope that perhaps they could record a little of their history to look back on in 20 years time and see just how far they have come.

'Because sometimes we will never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory.'