Alison: This week’s object is our ordinary old soap dish, and this object takes my memory straight back to Barnaby’s first marriage in Berlin where we had a very happy marriage day and an astonishing wedding ceremony which all happened on a canal boat, and in the process of that weekend we walked along the streets of Berlin past a Saturday market and I noticed an object on a stall that took my eye with lust but we had to rush because Claudia walks fast, so a few minutes later I said I had to go back for something so I rushed back and bought this object which I’ve really loved every since.
I love this object because the pewterer has worked in repousee and I can do repousee and he’s just filled the heart shape really nicely with the wings and the tail and the beak.
It’s also a little bit broken so its not a perfect thing – it has some lost tendrils on the top left hand side, and altogether it is just an object that has been used and loved and tossed around, and I’m very fond of it. I just enjoy the action of scraping my soap every day.
[Anthony is saying ‘it’s almost certainly WMF’ a company who are leaders in domestic design.]
After school, I had been to Germany on an exchange with the daughter of a rather serious theologian, in Marburg and Larne, and she came and spent time with us in Campden Hill Square. It was something that you did between school and university – you went and you got experience on the continent – I think one stayed about three months, something like that, with a family. I had a dramatic experience with my German family. They were not domesticated, but they did love eating. They never washed up, they washed up once a week, and the kitchen was quite remarkable in the amount of crockery and cutlery that they amassed, in the business of stacked up dirty stuff from the previous day or two, and I remember taking part in these enormous washing up rituals, and I didn’t enjoy it much. However each man to his own. Oh they were educated all right, they just didn’t like washing up.
The Royal Collection 