A bit of detective work

We’ve been getting a bit of building work done to put a new bathroom suite in.  We wondered when the room had last been altered to install the horrible acrylic bath we ripped out, and found some newspapers under the floor boards.

They are from a local paper, but there was no date on the piece we have.  However, reading the fragmentary article revealed the minutes of a Council meeting where they were talking about “Jubilee Week” celebrations.  As part of this they referenced 21st May as being a Saturday.  These pieces of information let me work out that the date of the work was 1977 – Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee year.

I was eleven that year and I remember that we all got a commemorative coin (I still have mine) and a tree to plant in the garden.  Mine was a silver birch – about ten years ago I went back to see the house in Cumbria where I lived at the time – and a sneaky peak at the back garden showed the tree still going strong.  There was a street party as well but we were on holiday in Spain and missed it – strangely when I think back to my childhood we always seemed to be away on holiday when anything interesting happened.