Metal Trunks Old Journeys And A Lifetime In London

Years later, another memory took hold. Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, shop antique chest (Pecina blog post) and the posters glued to walls advertised elephants, acrobats, jugglers, and those painted clowns. You could feel it before you saw it. Horses clattered down the lane, and everything smelled of canvas, rope, and damp grass. It felt like ordinary life had slipped a gear. So I leave them where I can see them, and I feel the room answer. Pigment quiets. Whenever I glance over, the clown looks back, as if waiting for the drumroll.

And when the kettle rattles and the light slants just so, 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. These days I see trunks in Shoreditch windows. Turn them into a TV stand. Some call it distressed, but I call it honest. A trunk keeps its place in the room. If a website shows you a battered corner, don’t turn your nose at the scar.

Pick the trunk with a story, and let it start speaking in your rooms. One day I came across a circus trunk, and my ears rang like a tent pole in wind. A clown stared back, inverted and bold, grin part-faded. It was more than paint. It felt like a voice from a lost world. Far from simple wood and hardware, cheap vintage trunk but a fragment of the travelling circus. You could call me a taught, taut storyteller with workman’s hands.

Sometimes I think a trunk can teach a wall to listen. When I tell this tale, it isn’t nostalgia for its own sake. Tilbury to tightrope, the seam holds and flexes. People now call trunks storage, but they carried lives before cheap plastic. They were crafted for wagons, ships, and rails. Thick boards, stout hinges, stubborn locks. Some wore brass corners or painted letters. Open one and you don’t just see space, you meet a journey.

Set it down and the floor remembers too. And then the internet held up a frame. One evening I found an ArtStation design, and it showed a clown suitcase storage trunk that matched mine. When I saw this poster on ArtStation of this clown suitcase storage, it took me back. This is exactly the same storage trunk that I had.. The odd inversion, the softened edges of age were near-identical. I half-believed the artist had stood where I stood.

Light to fibre, eye to hand: the ghost was the same joker. My workspace smells of oil, wood, large storage trunk and patient repairs. I see it tucked beside a pole, crammed with shoes, wigs, and greasepaint, silent as a drum just before lights-up. Each bruise and nick hint at years of sidings and side streets. You can almost hear the locks click.