Jennifer Horgan: I'm mourning a broken laundry basket - it held so many memories

We get attached to the oddest objects, but those emotional bonds are real

Children understand the significance of objects more than us adults. They instinctively come to depend on teddies and blankies in childhood. File picture

It wasn’t annoyance. It was an inconvenience, certainly. I knew I’d have to go out and buy another washing basket, but that’s not what I was feeling when it broke.

I felt genuine, heartfelt sadness. I didn’t cry but on another day I might have. It was my own fault too. I loaded too many towels onto the flat base and so the single arm broke off on one side. The weave snapped.

I found the basket about 13 years ago. I had just moved to Abu Dhabi and because I’d come from London, I didn’t drive. For the first few months I stayed in our apartment all day every day with two babies who woke at about 5am and never slept through the night.

By the time I came across it, I’d found a man who was happy to be my regular taxi driver. Some days he’d bring sweets for the babies. I can’t say I was delighted with the sour, sugar-coated gummies, but I knew he missed his own children in Bangladesh. 

As an ‘ex-pat,’ and not an ‘immigrant’, I felt guilt for having my babies with me. So many people didn’t get to have theirs. Every day he dropped us at a play group in a hall next to a Protestant church.

The basket was hidden under a shelf in a thrift shop next door. I loved its shape, like a prop in an old film. You slipped your arm under, dangling it from your elbow. It was culturally familiar to me in a place that felt very alien. It belonged in a cottage or an old French vineyard. I imagined someone using it to collect flowers in a cool field.

The basket has been a daily feature of my life since. We’ve spent years together collecting dirty clothes or distributing fresh ones. The loads have changed from tiny socks and babygrows to hoodies with brash logos, football gear and a great many towels. Teenagers shower often – hence the eventual breakage.

I loved the basket for having travelled with me. The basket reminded me that my previous life happened – all of it. It recalled the hot tiles in our apartment in Abu Dhabi, the sun snaking inside as you gathered your washing, face squinting. When it broke, a connection to my past, my family’s past, broke too.

To anybody else it was just a basket.

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

Objects often mean more to us than we let on and not just the obvious ones like heirloom rings or first edition books.

It’s one reason the homeware section of charity shops breaks my heart a little. That naff-looking vase may seem like junk to us, but it could have been Mary’s prized possession, given to her before her wedding by a beloved family member.

I met a man in the park this week who came over to chat to my dog. He had a similar guy for 15 years. His wife has his ashes in their sitting room. She talks to him all day long – to a little pile of ashes in a small urn. 

He said:" She doesn’t know what she’d be saying to him but she’s always at it."

Good on her. She understands that an object with significance is worth more than most things. Objects steady us, they ground us in a sense of reality that is increasingly comforting – most especially when things change. Time marches on. Objects give us something to hold as we follow.

‘The Criterion Collection’

It’s also the case that objects are making a comeback. Perhaps like me you also have ‘The Criterion Collection’ popping up on your feed. If not, it involves celebrities with cultural influence looking through a library of DVDs. 

The most recent one has Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes bumping around in the tiny space with ‘goodie bags,’ picking out their favourite, sometimes obscure titles. Binoche enthuses: “DVDs are so great because you can share them with your families and friends.” 

Like set-dancing, the object is making a comeback. The world may have migrated online but many of us crave something physical and authentic in real time.

Letters Live entertained the Glastonbury crowds on the Greenpeace Stage last Friday. Celebrities shared funny or touching letters from the past. Andrew Scott, performing at the event, spoke about his recently deceased mother’s letter writing. 

“She was an expert letter writer,” he said, “very funny and very brilliant with words.” He cherishes her letters, particularly now. He cherishes the ‘flare’ of her writing, the mistakes. 

A huge part of that power is that letters are objects in the world. We keep them in our drawers. We re-read them, pass them down to our children, archive them. A letter isn’t a letter if it isn’t down on physical paper in a physical envelope, posted and received by hand. 

Letters will never be replaced by the internet, just as books will never get replaced by e-readers. We all, intuitively, understand the weight of them.

Childhood treasures

Children understand the significance of objects more than us adults. They instinctively come to depend on teddies and blankies in childhood. Donald Winnicott, the English paediatrician and psychoanalyst  labelled them ‘transitional objects’ – those soft things we clutch in infancy to manage the next stage of development. 

I still remember the horror of leaving my son’s beloved Marley on a chair in a Dutch airport. For years we tried to re-frame our parenting fail as the start of Marley’s great adventures in the sky. It took at least six months of bedtime distress before he bought it.

New research suggests that these furry friends are not just important for children, however. According to a study by the University of London, adults who keep “sentimental objects from childhood” are more psychologically stable.

The university’s Department of Psychology reveals that these adults manage stress better and have more self-awareness.

I can’t say I have a childhood toy, but I do have a very beguiling cat in the chair next to my bed. She’s very cool – with a sad wise face. I like to think she’s French. The girl looks good anywhere and I like having her around.

What if I were a man?

But consider this – might I sound a little unhinged if I were a man? Seriously, if this wasn’t my column but one written by Fergus Finlay or Mick Clifford, would it have lost you at the broken basket? I suspect it could have.

There is a great pain in that difference – what we allow women to feel but not men.

I was told by quite a few people that I had to stop buying my son animal toys when he was as young as nine or 10. “You’ll make a fool out of him.” 

It’s one small part of a much bigger problem. The absolute line we mark in the sand for our boys. There is childhood and then there is being a man. There is dependence and then there is manly strength. 

Even before puberty hits, the world suggests we strip their little beds and their little hearts of softness and comfort. How wrong we have it. 

Humans are dependent, designed that way. There is a reason that it takes over a year for us to walk and longer to talk. We have the mark of dependency right at our centre – that little worm-curl of a belly button we all hide under our clothes and blushes. 

Denying boys their dependency, their little teddies, makes them less self-aware and less secure, just as the London study suggests.

Anyway, all this from a basket.

I have it hanging from a shower head we don’t use upstairs now. I can’t part with it. I’m thinking I might break the arm off altogether and maybe frame the base? A step too far? Or a step just far enough for an object I love, a companion, a comfort – a friend.