Some more exciting news from the vacation front. After my kid went for an extended nap (thank piss for that!) I decided to rummage through some boxes in the basement that have been taking up some much needed space. I figured I'd paw through em, toss it all, and be able to put more, important shit there at a later date.

Five of the six boxes were from my Grandfather's place back when he died. (I'd put that at about six years ago now, I guess.) The shit was brought over by my Uncle, who said to take what I want and toss the rest...I never did get around to looking through them, I guess.

I popped the first box open and was delighted to find a whole stack of old records. Thirty in all, they were original copies of some really great (and some not so great) music from the sixties and seventies. There were five Johnny Cash records (I own an original copy of Folsom Prison and didn't even know it!!), a few Conway Twitty albums (meh), some of those shitty K-Tel "Hits of the..." types, and a bunch of country/western artists I've never heard of before. What really shocked me was that he had almost every major realese by the Beatles in there, too!

Now, when my mum was growing up my Grandfather had apparently forbid the kids from listening to that "shaky music". No Elvis, no Beatles, no Rolling Stones. He thought they would corrupt young young minds or something. Apparently, he was the world's biggest and best hippocrite, because he had secretly stashed away a bunch of the exact same music he would pile-drive the kids for listening to. I called mum and she said that when they were growing up, he had a hobby shed where he did all his wood work. The kids were never allowed inside, as they would "fuck shit up"...exactly how my mum explained it to me...so nobody really knew what went on in there. (She said he had a hard time making the transition from England to Canada, and that was his way of coping with the change, or something like that.) He must have secret-stashed the stuff for only his enjoyment. Clever fellow, he was. Keeping face while still enjoying the "shaky music" he claimed to hate so much.

The other boxes yielded some other cool finds, but none as cool as the first one. A bunch of those Mac Bolean detective books, a few Ian Flemming novels (very few actually Bond books), a big book of Western Medicines from the mid-70s, some odds-n-ends paperwork he kept (manuals to electronics, old proof of purchase cards) and a sack load of playing cards. One of the boxes actually had a bunch of empty cologne bottles in it. I'd heard from my Uncle that he used to hide booze in the empty bottles, so that might explain why they were there...who knows. Old newspaper clipings of seemingly useless content, knick-knack crap and some very old Liverpool FC items rounded out the other boxes. (Those will go in my collection for sure.) The rest was pure crap---ash trays, smoke-stenched tea towels, yellowed rolls of tape, two telephones without the receivers (??) and an old, empty pack of Export cigarettes from about thirty years ago. The one box not from his place was a bust: nothing but old text books I'd forgotten I'd packed away and a bunch of sheet music to songs I don't remember wanting to learn how to play. The only cool thing in the last box was an old-school pencil case with the Muppet Babies on it...not mine, so it must have been an item of someone elses I'd stolen over the years.

I found it quite an interesting afternoon. Pawing through all his old stuff made me think of him, something I'm ashamed to admit I haven't done in a long time. The stuff I decided to keep (three full boxes worth...plus the records) I will treasure for a long time...or stick away in another section of the basement, depending if the wife allows me to "put that shit up".

No real point here. It was just an interesting afternoon I thought I'd share with you.

Thanks for reading,

-The Big Bad