We’ve been clearing out our clutter.

It was well overdue as some boxes hadn’t been opened since we moved two years ago.

I highly recommend it. Not only have we got rid of so much rubbish – we found a few little gems to boot.

My first great find was a sort-of scrap book my maternal grandmother put together. Old newspaper cuttings of births, deaths and marriages of people she knew, interesting stories and other tidbits that caught her attention from the 1930s to the late 1970s.

I found one entry headlined: Mrs A. Fairbrother. It was the funeral notice of my paternal grandmother Annie Fairbrother. It went on to list the mourners including the line: “Mrs R. Fairbrother (daughter-in-law) was unable to attend owing to indisposition.”

That was my heavily pregnant mother and I was the indisposition. Mentioning pregnancy or the imminent birth of a second child was obviously a bit too much information.

I never knew my grandmother on my father’s side. She died following a fall just before I was born. Two different newspaper cuttings list her age as 74 and 75 – good to see accuracy/consistency was alive and well in journalism then.

My grandmother who had kept all these cuttings had an interesting past.

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