Being an obsessive collector has its advantages.
The things you collect often act as little aide memoires reminding one of the time and place where they were collected.

I was sitting down admiring my glasses last night (as I often do) when the Green Gustavsberg plate caught my eye.
It has only been given its proud place with the glasses for a couple of weeks and looks its best ever against the black wall.

It has a great history.

It spent the first 20 years of its life in my mother and father’s bathroom in Tree Tops in Cork.
I remember it always dusted with my mother’s talcum powder.

In the fifties there was a Marian Year and she and my Father had decided to go to Rome.
This was way before cheap flights and they decided to go from Cobh on a Cruise Liner.
They behaved on this liner as all passengers did at the time (I always think that going on a cruise must be a little like going to Butlins ) and played organised games for prizes.
Mum and Dad won at Deck Quoits (I have no idea how this was played) and were presented with The Green Plate.

After they sold Tree Tops it came with them to Knockeen where it rested in some splendour in the downstairs loo.

Now here I must diverge a little.

My Mother had a total horror of there being any fighting in the family over her possessions after she died.
Therefore she allocated every last cup, picture, every piece of furniture to individual children and grandchildren.
This was all listed and kept in the “secret” drawer in the bureau in the sittingroom in Knockeen.
My sister D, the eldest of the siblings, was instructed to read out this list to all the family on the day after my mother’s funeral.

And that is exactly what happened.
And there was no squabbling on the day, quite a lot of swapping, I remember swapping a mahogany table for a mahogany bookcase.

When everyone had cleared out the house my brother David and I went to say the last good byes.
We discovered that my mother hadn’t allocated the ham pot, the large 50’s alluminium boiler used always for the ham at Christmas and then I discovered the green plate in the downstairs loo.
Forgotten by my Mother and everyone else.
David insisted I took it too.

When I brought it home to Waterford I looked at it afresh.
It was really quite beautiful.
It had a name on the back, Gustavsberg Argenta and a quick Google search revealed that it was a nineteen thirties Swedish piece and quite valuable.
Why Argenta though ?
Then I took the Silvo to the black fish inlaid in the plate and then discovered that it is in fact silver.
This I think was something that my Mother had never discovered and anyway it very soon reverted to its previous patinated black.
And that is the way I have left it.
But now at last it has been given a rather more proud position and has managed to leave the bathrooms behind.