Hoaking through the kitsch

The In-laws are having a clear out, which means we have been the happy recipients of several boxes of suspect material from the bedroom my wife occuppied before she left home. Some of what emerged from the foostie smelling banana boxes was delightful. For instance we found loads of my wife's school work from when she was quite young, through to A-level physics and the like. Some of what we found was quite twee, happy debris left over from the array of trinketry that marked the course of one little girl's childhood. Hugely enjoyable to rake through all this, and try and imagine what my wife must have been like at various stages of her life - so many years before we met.

Other things which emerged from the innards of the boxes however, was far more sinister - like the giant Charles and Di wedding album pictured. Before I get all smug and superior and say that when the 'dreadful duo' got married I was somewhat disinterested and went outside and played in a huge sandpit on the farm in Cornwall where we were on holiday at the time - it would be fair to point out that when it happened my future-wife was a very young girl, and that the princess fantasy seemes to be peculiarly de rigeour for small females! Also, she had the privilege of growing up in the loyalist half of Northern Ireland - which has the reputation for being the last bastion of Royalist paraphenalia left in the UK (although this too is fading fast and is technically known as the peace-dividend). On the other hand, I was young enough to think that the Royal wedding was tedious in the extreme - and that was before it got worse and he kissed her - YUK!

Nevertheless, whilst at the time such an album would have disinterested me - in retrospect to hold such a priceless example of kitsch is a remarkable thing! To read all the puke-rendering text about marriages made in heaven and the like, is very black comedy indeed. Who would have thought that only a few years later the re-run of the Trial of Queen Caroline would have been conducted in the courts of the tabloids! What is equally remarkable is that it is ten years since Diana's death, well as Mohammaed Al Fayed would presumably say, Tempus Fuggit!

We're only a little way into the boxes - I can't wait to see what horrors or delights this family time-capsule will reveal next!