User:RafaelColquhoun

I arrived in England as a young lad just after the war. The sea beat a drum I still hear. One lesson stuck hard: a trunk carries a life inside it.

When we come across the water, that battered storage trunk held our world. hard like iron yet carrying soft stories inside. The lid smelled of oil and salt.

It’s easy to miss the point, those trunks earned their weight. Each bruise on the skin was a chapter. Watch old films and you’ll see it.

I learned the shopkeepers by their voices, and it stayed with me. Records, buttons, keepsakes: the trunk turned clutter into story.

Years later, another memory took hold. Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, and the posters glued to walls boasted elephants, fire eaters, trapeze artists, and clowns. Anticipation walked ahead of the drums. Horses clattered down the lane, and everything smelled of canvas, rope, and damp grass. It was chaos and colour and a kind of magic.

I found another trunk in those years, and my hands forgot what to do. Painted on the panel, a clown face eclipsed by time. It wasn’t decoration. It carried the hush of a different age. Far from simple wood and hardware, a splinter of that wandering life.

The room holds the hush before the music. I picture the trunk pushed against canvas, crammed with shoes, wigs, and greasepaint, quiet until the band kicked. All choosing the right antique chest for décor scuffs on the hinges hint at years of sidings and side streets. You can almost hear the locks click.

And then a new mirror landed in my lap. A digital print crossed my path, and it showed a clown suitcase storage trunk that matched mine. The memory walked in wearing fresh boots. The tilt of the face, the paint bleeding into the grain all felt uncanny. I half-believed the artist had stood where I stood. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the ghost was the same joker.

We treat trunks like containers, though they were the way people travelled. They were made to survive knocks and wooden storage trunk weather. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some carried names, routes, and crests. Open one and you don’t just see space, you meet a life. Close it again and it keeps the secret.

I see steel boxes forgiven into coffee tables. Stack them three high beside a sofa. Some call it distressed, but I call it earned. A trunk keeps its place in the room. If a website shows you a battered corner, don’t call it junk. Take home the box that understands time, and watch it stand another fifty years.

Sometimes two lives sit shoulder to shoulder on my floor. Both knew waiting. I read the scratches like scripture. They don’t compete, but together they hum low. That’s how history breathes: in weight.

I’ve earned my living with things that outlast moods. Sometimes I think it leaks from one thing to the next. When I speak on trunks, I’m not selling romance. Windrush to ringmaster, the rope is spliced but strong.

So I leave them where I can see them, and I talk to them without speaking. Metal warms. Whenever I glance over, the clown looks back, as if asking when the tents go up again. And when the window fogs and clears, I think I hear a dock call and a trumpet answer, and I nod to the lids like old friends: keep it safe, keep it near, keep it true.