Notes

Made in 1794, this spoon has already outlived every person who first held it. Before it ever reached a table, it was carried to Goldsmiths' Hall, tested and struck with the marks that still identify it today, a formal guarantee of its silver that has never once needed renewing in well over two centuries. From there it would have entered ordinary life, bought, used, inherited, sold, bought again, passing quietly through many hands and households.

In that time, it has almost certainly sat at Christmas tables and christenings, at the ordinary Sunday dinners and the ones that mattered more than most, present at gatherings its original owner could never have imagined and touched by generations of hands he never met. Silver of this kind survives precisely because it was treasured and used, someone's functional but sentimental treasure, a gift from a father or friend, the embodiment of human relationships and history captured in an ordinary silver basting spoon.