This is the bread board which we use and, because we eat home-made whole wheat bread just about every day, it has seen, over the years, a fair bit of use. As a result, it's part of the furniture, something that's there but hardy noticed - until today, when Mrs MW suddenly said that she could remember her mother using it when she was a small girl.
This means that it is at least seventy years old.
I think it's wonderful that it's still in use, that it hasn't been superseded by something more modern, more user-friendly, more hygienic, and it says something for its maker's choice of wood that, although it does show....
....the score of many sharp knife strokes, it's still in remarkably good condition - good enough to do another seventy years in someone else's caring ownership.
One or two other things interest me - now that I've bothered to look at it closely. It appears to have been made of a single piece of wood yet it has chevron-shaped marks, perhaps cuts, at six points around its rim. Their purpose, other than for decoration, escapes me. There is also a single hole drilled into it, perhaps enabling it to be hung out of the way on the wall.
It's one of a range of objects we have which we still use, that were our parents' before us. As far as Mrs MW is concerned, we still use, amongst other things, her parents' dining table and its six chairs, two small chest-of-drawers, several pictures, and some of her mother's pots and pans. I'm strangely proud of them.
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