From Ships To Pubs: A London Story About Storage Chests

Sometimes the dock and the big top shake hands. One rolled across counties. I let my knuckles knock, soft as prayer. They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they settle the air. That’s how memory moves: in grain. And then a new mirror landed in my lap. One evening I found an ArtStation design, and the design looked eerily like that same trunk. The sight of it turned a key in the dark. The skew of the grin, the way colour sank into wood were near-identical.

For a moment I wondered if the artist had seen mine. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the ghost was the same joker. I do the small jobs that let memory stay upright. Sometimes I think memory is contagious. When I name the dents, I’m reading the minutes of a meeting. Windrush to ringmaster, the seam holds and flexes. We think of trunks as boxes, yet once they moved whole families. They were crafted for wagons, ships, and rails. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some were touched with flourishes and pride.

Inside is more than capacity, you meet a life. Latch it and it holds the temperature of memory. So I keep both trunks, and I go about my day. Metal warms. Whenever I glance over, the clown looks back, as if waiting for the drumroll. And when the buses moan along the road like slow whales, I think I hear a dock call and a trumpet answer, and I remember the only lesson worth the weight: a trunk is never empty.

I stumbled on a chest that carried the show inside it, and my hands forgot what to do. A clown stared back, inverted and bold, grin part-faded. It refused to be a flourish. It carried the hush of a different age. Far from simple wood and hardware, a splinter of that wandering life. I watch memory get a new job as furniture. Turn them into a TV stand. Some call it shop antique chest (written by stir.tomography.stfc.ac.uk), but I call it still beating. A trunk keeps its place in the room.

If you pass a market and the lid winks, don’t turn your nose at the scar. Pick the trunk with a story, and let it carry you too. The old workshop where I keep it still hums. I picture the trunk pushed against canvas, crammed with shoes, wigs, and greasepaint, waiting for the show to begin. All the scuffs on the hinges suggest roads and antique chest rain and rough travel. You can almost feel the rush before the ringmaster’s call. Years later, another memory took hold. Once a year the tents rose overnight and changed the air, and the posters glued to walls promised elephants, fire breathers, acrobats — and always clowns.

The feeling arrived days before the wagons. Horses clattered down the lane, and everything smelled of canvas, rope, and damp grass.