The Heart-Shaped Tin by Bee Wilson: It is not hoarding if it warms your heart

Get rid of the clutter,’ they tell us. Only keep a mere handful of objects which ‘spark joy’. Thinking about the chaos compulsive ‘hoarders’ live in, the advice of Marie Kondo and other de-clutterers is very wise indeed.

The trouble is, it underestimates the significance of objects in our lives – things enshrined in memory. Only touch that old-fashioned cup and saucer, or that old ornament of a simpering porcelain shepherdess, and you might be transported back to your grandmother’s front room when her display cabinet full of china delighted your childish eyes. Association can make the most humble object sacred.

Food writer Bee Wilson understands this well. Her new book is a journey of discovery around a collection of domestic objects – her own and other people’s – that are laden with associations and evoke the deepest emotions.

It all started the day the heart-shaped tin in which she had baked her own wedding cake 23 years earlier inexplicably fell to the ground from the dresser where it had lain for years. It was as if the rusting old tin object somehow knew that her husband had left her just a couple of months earlier, leaving her heart-broken.

It was a painful reminder of past happiness. What did she do with the tin? You have to wait until the last chapter to find out.

The symbolism of the heart-shaped tin haunted the author, and she set out on a quest to examine the meaning of other objects within her own life, her mother’s, and the lives of friends and acquaintances with varied stories to tell. Roopa Gulati’s china dinner service was a good example.

The chef and food writer’s parents were from the Punjab area of India, and when they came to England they felt they just had to buy a posh dinner service. The elegant Royal Doulton set was so precious neither Roopa nor her brother were allowed to help wash it up.

When she finally inherited the set, Roopa kept it in the attic for fear of breakages. But when her husband Dan was diagnosed with a brain tumour, she finally decided to use the china. What is the point of keeping lovely things if you don’t use them?

Some objects, Bee Wilson believes, seem to possess magical qualities. Why else would something valued by an absent husband seem to carry with it the trace of his DNA – and all the memories of the love you shared? Maybe it’s only a drinking glass (say), but the symbolism can be much, much greater than you could ever have imagined.

One handheld rotary whisk, used for years for beating eggs and cream, can represent a whole package of what we might call Magical Thinking – treasured moments with a mother, but also all that beloved person’s hopes and dreams, their disappointments and death.

The author’s chapter on the old whisk is one of many moving meditations in this lovely, thoughtful book, as she describes her own mother’s decline into dementia, and the final, sad, filial duty of clearing her house after death.

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She looks at ‘a few things that felt especially characteristic of our mother: a beaded necklace, some pretty blue plates, scraps of poems she had written as a child…’ Then comes the devastating realisation, ‘…that most of the articles a person has carefully selected and accumulated across a lifetime are reduced to trash when they are no longer there to use them’.

Why keep Mother’s favourite pan when your own pan drawer is over-stuffed? Who would want to hang on to the metal gadget for scooping balls of melon – even if your sons used to love using it? Can you bear to look at the ugly kitchen canisters your mother thought so wonderful? What do you do about loving what is actually junk?

Such questions could, of course, be dismissed as rampant sentimentality. But that word implies shallow self-indulgence, whereas the feelings Bee Wilson invokes are deep and real. The book’s subtitle makes this clear: Love, Loss And Kitchen Objects.

The objects themselves are far less important than the stories they tell, or the strange significance they have in somebody’s life. For example, why would a man collect corkscrews, especially when screw caps now dominate the wine market?

The chapter on this is less about the personal than history itself. The owner of the local deli where Wilson buys delicious treats has amassed a large collection of antique corkscrews, because they create a ‘connection’ with previous generations.

The man grew up in bleak and straitened Eastern Europe, and so the corkscrews evoke ‘an earlier and freer Europe in which there were waiters opening bottles of wine and lemonade in lovely cafes’. Just touching one of the old corkscrews ‘can offer continuity with the human beings who handled it before us…’

As she roams the world and its stories, Wilson meets people who deal with their own loves and losses by projecting irrational emotions on to objects. Why, for example, would a man in a concentration camp painstakingly (and dangerously) create a metal spoon from a piece of tin?

Why would specific vegetable corers mean the world to a refugee who felt he could never cook properly without them?

In one way these are stories of dependency, but more important is what they tell us about identity. Reading them, I realise how cherishing my grandmother’s cheap china figurines represents my pride in her hardworking life. The memory is rooted in class.

Bee Wilson divides the essays into Charms, Mementos, Junk, Tools, Symbols, Gifts and Treasure, and covers a wide variety of subjects, from an Italian bowl to a kitchen unit hanging off a wall in bombed Ukraine.

The whole collection of entertaining and moving meditations offers historical as well as personal riches, and celebrates the durability of objects that – when we create meaning from them – offer a precious lesson: ‘We could try to change our values and see second-hand things as more beautiful and special than the shiny and new.’