The Magic Box

My father has given me a box, it's a wooden toolbox. It was made before I was born from real wood with tongue and groove joints. It has brass riveted corner pieces with a leather carrying handle and small a lock with a key that still turns as sweetly as the day it was made. Inside it has a number of wooden drawers each with a green baize lining as smooth as a snooker table.

My father was an engineer before he retired and the box was designed to keep on a work bench to hold all those tiny implements of the trade. It's worn and scuffed. The varnish has been rubbed off over the years, the leather handle needs replacing and some of the baize inside the draws has worn through. It smells slightly of the oil that he used to look after his tools. He says he bought it when he first went into the trade and it was his constant companion on his work bench during the decades at work earning the money to pay the mortgage and bring up the family.

My father retired from engineering many years ago and has given it to me to 'pass on' as it were. I don't believe you could get anything like it these days unless you built it yourself or paid someone else to do it. It cries out to be refurbished and used. Unfortunately I can't think of anything I can actually use it for. It would be ideal if you were a model builder or an artist with pencils and crayons to store. If you were a stamp collector you could keep all your little bits in it. Perhaps if you were an angler you could keep your various flies and hooks in it. How about crochet or needle point. It's not much use to an amateur musician, blogger and aspiring short story writer. I even thought of building one of those plastic models of a sailing galleon just so I could keep my knives, paints and little plastic doodahs in it.

 It's strange to say but sometimes things seem to take on a life of their own.  In one of my previous career incarnations I was an Estate Agent and some houses definitely have an atmosphere, even after the previous occupiers have moved out. My father's box sits in the corner looking sad, lost and desperate to be used like a puppy with big brown eyes begging to be played with. I have no doubt I will attempt to refurbish it and try and find it gainful employment because I couldn't bear the guilt if I didn't. Perhaps I should take up poisoning, it would be excellent for storing all those little bottles of arsenic, deadly nightshade extract and strychnine, it really looks the part. Just like something Sherlock Holmes might have. Anyone fancy popping round for dinner?