Trip to the Tip

... was the ritual cry of delight, repeated ad libitem by the staff of Wycombe Museum when a visit to the 'local amenity centre' beckoned to dispose of, not items from the collection I hasten to add, but broken bits of equipment, surplus display materials and the like. Unable, as I said last time, to make it to Robbie and Freida's housewarming, instead I indulged in a Trip to the Tip of my own. I seemed to come away with almost as much as I took there. 

I've been looking for a small glass bowl to use when we do external communion services at Widelake and other places since our last one got broken, so this is a welcome and useful find. My eye was caught by the little handpainted blue bowl, a small item which can happily sit on a variety of windowsills in my house. Thereafter even I admit my finds become a bit more questionable. I have no idea what the silvery thing you can see at the back of the photo is: it looks bizarrely like a metal pomegranate and has a little stalk to hang from. I ought to have known what the small object that looks like a titled eggcup was, but it took my knowledgeable friend Ms Brumneedle to identify it as, probably, a cigar rest. It's silver plate, even though it doesn't have an EPNS mark, and just needs a bit of buffing up. I now have a stand for the cigars I don't smoke to add to the ebony watch stand for the fob watch I usually keep upstairs, which Ms T gave me all of ten years ago. 

And then there is the La Virgen de la Candelaría key rack. La Virgen de la Candelaría is a particular image of the BVM (and a Black Madonna, too) who is the patron saint of Tenerife, and this stunning item is a prime example of the tat a tourist might bring home from a trip to that island. The icon is a bit of printed paper, the wood it's mounted on looks like it comes from an orange box, and everything else is gold plastic. How could I resist that.