BACK STORIES are a rich source of information and entertainment, but we have evolved not to think about them because absolutely everything has its own history - and dwelling on the history of everything can lead to cognitive overload. It’s a shame, though, because we miss so much - we look without seeing. And so I’m going to offer you a practical exercise in curiosity.
Think about what you are wearing on your upper body. Its origin is either animal, plant or chemical: a cotton shirt started life as seedlings on a plantation; a woollen sweater was once part of an animal grazing in a field or on a hillside; a polyester fleece has to have been made in a factory.
Okay, now take a little while to think about that plantation, that farm or that factory. What would it have looked like? Who would have worked on it? Where would it have been made?
Was your sweater born in New Zealand, or in Scotland? Did your cotton shirt originate in India? Can you imagine the woman picking the cotton buds in the field? Or perhaps your fleece is made from recycled materials, each of which has its own back story - think of all of those plastic bottles, and the people who made them, bought them, drank from them and binned them.
It’s a banal observation, perhaps, but because everything has its own history, everything is a doorway into a different world.
For instance, I have in my safe two small opals, each less than the size of a little finger nail. They’re not very interesting, and they’re not worth very much. Occasionally I think of having them set as a gift for my wife, which was my original intention when I bought them in Melbourne, Australia, 30 years ago. But I don’t really understand jewellery enough to get the design right - and they’re not very interesting anyway so there they stay, safely locked away.
They were carved out of the earth by a miner in Coober Pedy - the opal mining capital of the world, 526 miles north of Adelaide; a place of such fierce daytime heat, the miners choose to live underground in ‘dugouts’.
I never met the miner, but I met his estranged wife at a dinner part in Melbourne. I remember her as being homely, and a little sad. I wondered whether she had lived underground with her husband, but I was too polite to ask.
The dinner was part of a ‘meet-the-locals’ initiative put together by organisers of a commercial property conference I had been sent to cover. It was held in the house of an extrovert and wealthy residential estate agent; a man who had made his money, retired to the Gold Coast, got himself a yacht and a brand new wife, and then got so bored he went back to work.
It’s a long time ago, and I can’t remember the agent's name. But I remember the nickname he gave me: "Bunty". I had worn a bow tie to dinner and - since I am so very English - I had reminded him of Billy Bunter, the ‘fat owl of the remove’. I didn’t see it as a compliment.
Anyway, I sat next to this woman - let’s call her Jane - and she told me about her time in Coober Pedy and her bust up with her husband, and I was sorry for her. She needed money, she said, and she had some opals she wanted to sell, was I interested?
I barely knew what an opal was, but I liked Jane and could see she was in trouble and I arranged to meet her outside a cafe in Melbourne the next morning. She asked me not to mention the meeting to anybody.
It turned out to be rather furtive, like a drug deal, with Jane showing me a handful of opals from which I selected two and which I put in the foot of a rolled sock when I packed to return home. I think I paid around £60, and Jane didn’t linger for a chat over coffee. I never saw her again.
The estate agent was really kind, and drove me all over the place for the few days I was there. He took me down the Great Ocean Road and we ate lobster and drank wine sitting on a beach. He took me to a nightclub in which a beautiful woman asked me to dance ("I can't. I'm English," I said), and to an Australian rules football game: I couldn’t work out what was going on in either place. He even offered me a job - producing a property journal for his expanding business. I declined.
A year or so later, he turned up with a friend in London and we had a night out. I found it difficult to match the enthusiasm, energy and courtesy he had shown me in Melbourne, and I ended the evening with the uncomfortable feeling that I had let him down. We didn't communicate much after that.
But I still have the opals: two tiny stones the colour of mist, with small flashes of fire in them. And whenever I come across them, I wonder about Jane, and whether she survived the crisis she was going through when I met her. I hope so.
For a long time, opals were considered lucky because they contained the colours of all the other gemstones. And then in 1829 Sir Walter Scott wrote a novel in which an opal talisman with supernatural powers turned to colourless stone when holy water was dropped on it, and its owner died. It wasn’t true, but the sale of opals halved in the following 20 years - and are still associated, in some cultures, with ‘the evil eye’.
Perhaps I’ll just leave them where they are then.