Welcome!

Our gorgeous Warm Fuzzies page never fails to give me, well, the warm fuzzies. But this week (Page 74) it delivered me, and the team, a bonus burst of nostalgia., and the fact that Benny was found all these years later. I won’t spoil the story, but I can tell you it has a happy ending. And while I’d never condone defacing someone else’s property, we all fondly remembered our own school desks, similarly engraved – all those scratched-in names and dates that made us think about the kids who’d gone before us. Mari told us about the time she came home from primary school and, over dinner, brightly asked the meaning of a four-letter word, which I certainly won’t repeat here. ‘The shock was palpable,’ she laughed. ‘My grandparents were there! But I’d seen it scratched into my desk and had no idea.’ Liz’s story was more romantic. On a trip to Europe 10 years ago, when she met her now husband Frank, he wrote inside a heart. ‘We were at the famous Juliet Balcony (of fame) in Verona, Italy,’ Liz said. ‘We weren’t yet together, so I guess that was his big move!’ But we also talked about how leaving our mark is something we do in so many ways. In the ’70s, my dad concreted our small backyard, which was a ‘thing’ back then. My sister, brother and I loved that he etched our names and the date in an inconspicuous spot. It’s been tiled over since, but one day, someone might find us Smith kids immortalised in concrete. More recently, Amber told us that before she and her partner, Dean, replaced their built-in wardrobe, they wrote their names on the wall, for future owners to find. I’d love to hear from any readers who have found keepsakes like that in their own homes!