A Slack Sunday Morning Post From Ephemera Burnett

There is a name for people like me: or so it would appear if eBay is to be believed. It is obviously a slack Sunday morning for the on-line auction site so it sent me a focused email pointing out some upcoming bargains in areas I have been active in - and those areas are as a "collector of ephemera". This obviously sent me straight to the Dictionary to double-check the exact meaning of "ephemera" ("a thing that exists or is used for only a short time"), and reassured that it was nothing too embarrassing, I decided to embrace the description and even considered incorporating it into my name - Alan Ephemera Burnett has a superior ring to it. I shall ignore for the moment (although I might later return to this on some slack Sunday morning in the future) the fact that the bits of old paper and pasteboard I hoard and collect are remarkable for their longevity rather than their transcendental nature and focus on a my bit of Sunday morning ephemera - the receipt for the deposit paid by my father for the house he bought in 1939. It has sat in an envelope for 75 years - until I took it out and scanned it this morning - slowly gathering creases, dog-ears and history. It has soaked up a patina of economic and social significance and achieved a kind of strange beauty that Frank Shepherd would never have believed back in 1939.