This is a toughie…since this popped in my inbox early this morning  a couple of weeks ago (have been dillydallying – yes, it IS  a word – over a simple thing like taking the two photos), I have been keeping an eye out as I have drifted around the house, an eye out for a few of my favourite things…well, there’s Kirk and Lulu, of course, who follow me all around the house…except for when Kirk disappeared this morning a morning a couple of weeks ago after breakfast: we got a possum on a couple of Sundays ago and so I think he’s kinda hopeful of getting another – I don’t know if he’s noticed yet but Lulu and Deeda have already stolen Sunday’s possum from where he buried it – tarts! – and there’s not much left of it now… (nope – Lulu was last seen with a bit of possum snout sticking out of her mouth and that was all she wrote)…

So…favourite things…I’m always rapt to acquire another book to replace one of the many that went missing or were ‘borrowed’ while I was on the move in the 80s and 90s…I now have all the Airfix Annuals again less #3 and thought it was a real coup to score a full set of the short-lived (all four!) Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine from the late 70s, complete with the posters…this was the one that, in each issue, analysed a modern (70s) science-fiction movie, one from the 60s and one from the 50s and merged themes from each into a poster in each issue….I still smile when I think of the article that tried to calculate the physical size that the Enterprise’s computer would have to be to hold all the information retrieved from it during the Original Series of Star Trek, drawing the conclusion that it would be impossible by virtue of its sheer bulk for any computer to hold that much information…meanwhile 35 years later…

I still have odds’n’sods from soldiering days…my Gerber ‘letter opener’, various bits and pieces of web gear that might be useful one day – Carmen was quick to commandeer my secateurs and folding tree saw pouches onto a belt for her forays into the Lodge’s garden/forest – and I still jealousy guard the original day park and vest webbing we developed in 1 RNZIR…oh, yes, and of course, there’s the hat collection that graces the big beam running across the study, acquired from here and there…thirty odd years of military head-dress…less the warmer stuff that has found its way into the cold weather front line of hooks by the back door…

But the thing is, I’m not really that attached to any of it…sure, I don’t want it to just be binned because each represents memories…my favourite cup when I was in Waiouru was the classic ‘cups’ canteen’ partly because it held a lot of coffee but also because some fairly brutal attrition and experimentation showed that, of all cup types, it was the absolute least likely to be stolen…I don’t think that I have any one thing (non-breathing anyway!) that I would be desperately cut up about if I were to loose it…I’d be hacked off to loose my photo collection but I’d get over it, and ditto for the book and movie library and my still growing model collection (although I am getting better and slowing down on acquisition)…

Some things you just can’t beat…