From Ships To Pubs: A London Story About Storage Chests
So I leave them where I can see them, and I sweep around them. Metal warms. Whenever I glance over, the clown looks back, as if the evening bell were about to ring. And when the buses moan along the road like slow whales, I think I hear my trunk breathe, and I nod to the lids like old friends: keep it safe, keep it near, keep it true. Time circled back with a different mask. The circus came to town once a year, and the posters glued to walls promised elephants, fire breathers, acrobats — and always clowns.
You could feel it before you saw it. Crews shouted across the field, and a tang of rope and canvas drifted everywhere. It felt like ordinary life had slipped a gear. There is a stillness that knows applause. I see it tucked beside a pole, crammed with shoes, wigs, and greasepaint, silent as a drum just before lights-up. All the scuffs on the hinges suggest roads and rain and rough travel. You can almost smell powder and brass.
One day I came across a circus trunk, and I just stared. Across the front was a hand-drawn clown, upside down. It wasn’t decoration. It carried the hush of a different age. Far from simple wood and hardware, a shard of the old show-world. I watch memory get a new job as furniture. Stack them three high beside a sofa. Some call it vintage, but I call it honest. A trunk doesn’t stop. If you pass a market and the lid winks, don’t call it junk.
Pick the trunk with a story, and let it carry you too. You could call me a taught, taut storyteller with workman’s hands. Sometimes I think it infects a room until every shadow hums. When I trace the paint, I’m taking attendance. Ship to wagon, the stitch looks rough but it will not part. And then the world doubled. A digital print crossed my path, and it showed a clown suitcase large storage trunk, read more on Gtanet`s official blog, trunk that matched mine. The memory walked in wearing fresh boots.
The skew of the grin, the way colour sank into wood all felt uncanny. I imagined the same trunk crossing two lives. Light to fibre, eye to hand: the echo landed in the same room. Sometimes I set the Windrush trunk beside the circus trunk. One knew kettledrums. I read the scratches like scripture. They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they hum low. That’s how memory moves: in steel. We think of trunks as boxes, though they were the way people travelled.
They were crafted for wagons, ships, and rails. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some were touched with flourishes and pride. Lift the lid and you meet a story, you meet a life. Close it again and it keeps the secret.