"Remembering Edwina Lavinia.."

So many lost things.
Such grief at the losing. BUT such joy at the finding.
What colour, what clutter, what mysteries, what lives, what stories...... lie within this huge room....this most emotional of places, this Railway Lost Property Office??

SEE a stuffed fox, leering beneath a glittery crown.
Handbags, tatty bulging tragic ones, glossy designer.
Mirrors? Ornate gilt ones, curtly shaped 60's ones...HOW do you lose a mirror like that on a train??
Flimsy lipsticky paperbacks....weighty learned musty old tomes...letters.
AND Rousseau jungley plants in pots.....
And false teeth, lots, with one pair still blooming with parsley!
Clocks ( a lovely Art Deco one) paintings ( the good, bad, ugly) AND brollies, of course....whole rainbows of them, stretched blindingly bright, bedazzling along heaving shelves.
Tshirts, scent/pong of their owners...ball gowns, pyjamas ( what story is THAT?) chairs (?) and bears and yes, EVEN AN URN...

I'm talking about a Lost Property Office, set up on the 5th floor of a towering office block.at Number One, First Street, Manchester. THIS was poet/novelist Jackie Kay's " Manchester Lines"... Manchester Library Theatre's second site specific work, ie. dramas taking place in unexpected places in the city.
Last May, we enjoyed " Hard Times" set in a mill in Ancoats, M/Ch, so this was a MUST and we loved it. It's in First St until Saturday July 7th.  http://www.librarytheatre.com/

** As we arrived, we were invited to jot down stuff we might have lost.
Some scrawled provocative things: " I've lost my perspective" ...."my little sister"... " my sideboard"... "my mind" " my mum"....one guy wrote: "IS it me you're looking for??".....
I jotted down " Edwina Lavinia"...because yrs ago, I lost my teddy on the tube ( don't ask!) ......and my husbandtobe kindly disappeard to Lost Prop at Baker St... and claimed said /sad bear.....the tatty, vulnerable 20 -something Edwina Lavinia...
And lo, Reader, I Married Him...