I broke an ornament

I BROKE an ornament yesterday.

Good.

It was a little frog sitting on a rock with a fishing rod and an even smaller fish dangling on the end of the line. It was awful. I probably knocked it off with some kind of sub-conscious malice.

I didn’t buy it. It was a gift. Obviously from someone who didn’t like me.

I want to know why it seems to be one of the natural laws of the world that the number of ornaments you are given rises in direct proportion to your age.

If we ever move we’ll need a container ship just to hold the ornaments!

When I was 18 the only ornament I had was a cricket bat that I threw in a corner of my bedroom. Now I’m 60 and I have acquired ornaments in the same way a house acquires cockroaches – by stealth, in the night.

I have never bought an ornament and yet I’m plagued with them.

And the frog, come to think of it, is not the worst of them. There’s a little man on a bike, all made of wire. You can’t break it! The bloody thing is welded together. And if you can’t break it you can’t throw it away.

It’s a curious thing about the human condition that we can only throw away ornaments when they’re broken.

Until then they sit on shelves and mantelpieces and on top of cupboards gathering dust and being generally repulsive. I suppose I should be grateful. The more I have to dust them the more likely I am to drop them. Except, as you will have guessed, I don’t dust them.

If, as Eleanor Roosevelt said, life is too short to stuff an olive, it’s certainly too short to dust a 10-centimetre-high ballerina with a face like a duck.

It’s my wife who dusts them. Carefully. Without dropping any. Well, not enough.

She says they have sentimental value. The ballerina was a gift from Great Aunt Ethel.

And therein lies the heart of the matter. Aunt Ethel was fond of ballet (and, clearly, second-rate pottery). She liked it, so she bought it for us. We have never given her the slightest hint that we like ornaments, ballet or ballerinas. She bought the damn thing because she liked it! Not because we would.

I would have preferred a bottle of 1942 Hardy’s claret.

She didn’t buy us that, of course, because it wouldn’t have cost 20 cents and when we’d drunk it we would no longer have been able to look at it remember Aunt Ethel.

Good.

And what happens to the world’s ornaments when people die? You’ve seen your granny’s mantelpiece. It’s an elephants’ graveyard of ornaments! What happens to them when she dies? How come the entire world isn’t wall-to-wall landfill crammed full of dead people’s ornaments!

We don’t break them at the same rate we acquire them. Not in our house, anyway. So it makes sense than in time we will all drown in a sea of appalling ornaments made from seashells and bits of pasta, or badly painted plaster of paris.

Take this appalling little statue I am holding, Of a clown, leaning on a lamppost…

Oops!