The bookshelves and windowsills of my home are neatly rowed with an ever-growing collection of vintage tins that are nothing much to look at: just old cough-sweet and tobacco containers, like the ones my grandfather regularly used for nuts, bolts, and fuses in his workshop. Some are rusty, others occasionally bear marks of old labels with handwriting long worn away.
But when I lift the lids, each reveals a bright reminder of a time and place in concentrate: sand from my childhood beach; rosehips and dried flowers from the lane I played along for my first nine years before my single mother remarried and moved us away; slate and moss from the stream my husband dammed as a small boy. Each was collected on a deliberate trip made to recover it.
How much more potent than old photos, these keepsakes are — I can open them, touch them, and hold them to my nose. Artefacts I can sometimes hand to my children or a new friend. The past is not a flat image on a screen, but a tiny treasure chest of texture, shape, and scent. But I don’t only make these tins, my Concentrates of Place, for nostalgia’s sake.
Our wake-up calls frequently arrive without warning—and so it was with mine. On a quiet Sunday afternoon in my 33rd year, just ten days after the birth of my first child, I began to die fast and without warning from a massive post-partum haemorrhage.
As the ambulance crew rushed me away, I experienced what I now call the slow time of accidents: a phenomenon also rarely reported by those who have survived car crashes or other sudden emergencies. Everything around me became incredibly close and etched with brilliance. How precious life looks when you’re leaving it.
By contrast, I had spent my twenties blinkered by steady office work and home renovations, habitually obsessed with creating the kind of routine and order I’d been without as a child. The angry adults who raised me broke so much and moved so often that I had few tangible reminders of the past, and any creative energy before my near death went into making a safety net for myself.
Emerging from an induced coma days later, I was seized with a need to live differently. Having almost lost my life in minutes, I wanted to play more, and to pay slow and generous attention to the world around me.
Every decision I’ve made since has consistently had this approach at its heart. But of all the ways I’ve found to celebrate the everyday, it is my Concentrates of Place—these collections of painstakingly arranged little artefacts of significant places—that resonate most strongly across different cultures and generations.
“What would you put in yours?” I ask whenever someone admires mine online or at the workshops I run, and they tell me poignant stories of seashells, cherry blossom, or bark from a silver birch tree: small things that would have been close to hand during a first kiss, a final goodbye, or a rare visit to a dear friend far away.
The Concentrates of Place have even been taken up by teachers in countries as far afield as North America, using them with their students as multisensory alternatives to the traditional (and joyless) “what I did last summer” exercise.
I always delight in every picture and story that reaches me from those who have taken my idea and adapted it. My life once narrowed in minutes to the width of an ambulance stretcher, with no time to exchange a last word or touch. But the simple creative exercise that grew out of that shocking experience has now connected me—steadily—to people all over the world. Share your own tin and its story using the hashtag #ConcentratesOfPlace. Tanya’s memoir, The Cure for Sleep: Memoir of a Late-Waking Life, is out now (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
rusty – covered with or affected by rust; old and corroded
potent – having a strong effect or influence; powerful
etched with – marked, carved, or clearly impressed (often used figuratively to describe something deeply impressed on the mind or memory)
seized with – suddenly affected or overwhelmed by a feeling or condition
resonate – to have a strong emotional or intellectual impact; to echo or connect with someone deeply