You Can't Climb Twice Into the Same Attic

Discovered last week while sorting through a box found in my parents' attic (in approximate chronological order of initial acquisition):

• A battered, shapeless, much-worn and extensively-repaired knitted toy of indeterminate species named Eggy, whom I loved exhaustively, and who's now sitting with B.'s equally shabby teddy bear on a shelf in the bedroom.
• A commemorative coin from the wedding of that charming Windsor couple, whose marriage turned out to be such an example to us all.
• A box of conjuring tricks endorsed by his eminence Paul Daniels (now en route to orphans in Romania or, er, somewhere).
• A clutch of smurves, who I'm fairly sure used to belong to my brother (and were therefore left behind for him to claim).
• Awards from my final prep school prize day, at which I seem to have pretty much swept the board. What a creep I was.
• Two Zoids, specifically Slitherzoid and Slime. I'm fairly sure there's still a Krark, Prince of Darkness up there somewhere.
• Various school exercise books, most of them now discarded but the English one (containing various bits of juvenilia) kept for novelty value.
• An album of photos from approximately 1986-88, showing me and a number of people I know -- and, in one case, Toyah Wilcox -- all looking scandalously young. (I used to wear ties to parties -- sometimes even bow ties. The horror, the horror...) Now shelved with our other photo albums.
• The poster and programme for a school production of Alan Ayckbourn's Woman in Mind. I was Gerald. (NB Ayckbourn's homepage is here, but Firefox seems to really hate it.)
• A book of stamps designed by some artist I'd never heard of (and still haven't), which I bought and kept on the grounds that one day it might be valuable. I suppose one day it might.
• Two bulging files of handwritten letters from various friends, showing how prolific we used to be as correspondents before we discovered email. These will, I'm sure, one day become an invaluable resource for a biographer of somebody I knew between roughly 1989 and 1994.

Except where noted, all of the above are going straight up into our attic.

Also acquired while with my parents: a noticeable paunch, courtesy of my Mum's culinary generosity. Oops.

Otherwise, and obviously aside from the wedding, the trip to Worthing was quiet. The parents took me, B., brother and sister-in-law out for a very convivial meal at a restaurant called The Fish Factory -- which appears to have an almost non-existent web profile, did much better vegetarian food than you'd expect from the name, and even had some vaguely interesting international bottled lagers.

Generally, though, the most interesting thing to do in Worthing is go to Brighton instead. So after a picnic at Devil's Dyke on Saturday, we saw the Rex Whistler exhibition at Brighton Museum, called in at the vegetarian shoe shop and wandered up and down the Lanes in a desultory sort of way. I always enjoy Brighton's bohemian ambience, and being there in the immediate aftermath of the Gay Pride march probably helped with that.

As I said to B., it's looking now as if the next weddings we'll be going to in Worthing will be those of our nieces and / or nephews, and they don't even exist yet. Hurry up and procreate, brother.