I tweeted yesterday that I found some interesting booty - a cannonball, a pair of ice skates and a WW1 bullet, inside a box. I forgot they had been stored in the basement, they were to form part of an exhibition earlier in the year but in the end they didn't make it into the display cabinets. You might wonder what a cannonball, pair of ice skates and WW1 bullet had in common, nothing, but as individual objects they represented visuals for the written exhibition boards. Finding the objects was an avoidance tactic. I was in the middle of writing a grant proposal and I needed distraction, I found it. I also found a cigarette packet and a small metal tin on my short wander round the basement. Short as in medium sized Carnegie library. The cigarettes were an empty packet of Kensitas extra size, it still had the little piece of silver foil on the inside and a very faint smell of tobacco. I also noticed some numbers faintly stamped on the bottom but I couldn't read them so I'm not sure what they represented. I think it dates back to the late 1940's, early 1950's.
The small metal tin, Altoids. It sounds more like a disease or dietary straining disorder than a peppermint. I wonder if whoever smoked the cigarettes used the Altoids to mask the tobacco smell.
