Goodbye old friend. I am not talking about people but things.
One of the places I spent around a quarter of a century of my life in was the press gallery at the House of Commons when the place worked really unsocial hours. It was perfectly possible to be trapped there from 10 in the morning until after midnight and the bar was a place of refuge which fulfilled everything a good local pub should do.
It wasn't heavy drinking – half pints of Federation bitter helped the medicine go down. There were bars for everyone: MPs, the staff and us. MPs could only enter our bar by invitation and the same applied to us for the several they had to drink in. We could all go to staff bars which tended to be places where people went to hide out.
This is all setting the scene for my farewell story. One evening, I said to Sam the gallery barman – sadly I cannot remember his surname, but he was one of nature's bar tenders, someone with an ear to listen when needed, a bit of gossip to pass on when required – that I admired the corkscrew he had just been using. 'Have it, Mr Russell' he said. 'I can always get them to give me another one – things are always being nicked in this place.'
So, since the early 1980s, I have been using the press gallery lost corkscrew, a little bit of yesterday in today, all the more treasured because that particular bar and Sam are no more. The other night I used it to open a bottle of wine which had a wedge of plastic cork above the actual cork and the corkscrew became inextricably enmeshed in the plastic. Nothing will get it out and believe me I have tried.
So what should I do? Put it in a drawer and look at it from time to time as one does with memorabilia? Or see sense and toss it in the rubbish bin before the time comes for the skip into which one's heirs deposit the detritus of one's past?
I think I will keep it. After all, it is a memory of some of, if not all, my yesterdays and I can hang it on the kitchen wall along with my collection of photo passes admitting me to places I will never get in to again – and the one with my hand being clutched by Mrs Thatcher.
Bill Russell
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