collectibles...

I must have been a bower bird in a past life because collecting is a favourite pastime of mine. I don't search out serious objet with vast provenance but rather old bits and pieces that somehow strike a chord. Like these mercury glass bottles.....

It was a winter's day when I set out to explore Mouries, a village about ten minutes from Saint Rémy de Provence. It is a small village, most famous for olives, on the other side of the Alpilles Mountains. It is not a village that I frequent regularly simply because it is that little further away and not on my regular beat. The beauty of winter in Provence is that there is more time and much more inclination to venture out and about....the scorching temperatures of July and August tend to make me a very lazy home body.

Mouries is a small village with a classic plane tree bordered main street. There are a couple of cafés, a boulangerie and patisserie, a fruit and vegetable shop and the presse (the newsagent). Small villages are forever changing - works in progress - business is tough when seasonal dependancy is a factor. Shops can be there one day and not the next...and that is how I found these 'collectibles'...

A small, 'antique' shop had opened on the edge of the town. Inside this charming space were Provencal style wood tables and commodes, waxed to gleam, their surfaces shining with mercury glass.... in all shapes and colours. I was immediately attracted to these silver bottles and curious to know what they had been used for. It was explained to me that the bottles came from Eastern Europe and were blown for the purpose of scaring birds. The bottles would be turned upside down, placed on wooden stakes and planted in the fields amongst the crops. Once the sun hit the mercury coloured glass the birds would be frightened by their reflective nature and fly off to safer pastures....

I couldn't resist them or their history so home they came. That was probably five or six years ago and that little shop has long gone - where or if anywhere, I don't know. That is the fun of exploring....you never know what you will turn up.....xv

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image - carla coulson