Sitting over coffee one morning, Elizabeth and I reflected together on the household objects that have particular value to us through the memories they hold. Who would know of these stories when we are gone? And does it matter? We recalled Neil Macgregor’s “History of the World in One Hundred Objects”, musing together about what might be part of our hundred objects.A friend, reading some of the early ones, remarked that they had some of the qualities that poet Robert Bly, in his edited collection News of the Universe, calls ‘Object poems’ in which ‘the object itself… links with the human psyche’; and that ‘things themselves have opinions or points of view’. In his residency at the Ashmolean Museum, the artist Ali Kazim drew inspiration from objects in the museum the collections from Gandhara, in northwest Pakistan. He believes ‘objects can connect us, directly and viscerally, to the people who originally made and used them’.
