{"id":247,"date":"2011-05-04T08:28:04","date_gmt":"2011-05-04T08:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=247"},"modified":"2011-05-04T08:28:04","modified_gmt":"2011-05-04T08:28:04","slug":"jim-murdochs-shoeboxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/jim-murdochs-shoeboxes\/","title":{"rendered":"Jim Murdoch's 'Shoeboxes'"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shoeboxes<\/span>
  <\/span>
One day my father gave me an empty shoebox. \u201cThat\u2019s love,\u201d he said and I said, \u201cThanks, Dad,\u201d and immediately went away to look for secret compartments. Finding none and being unable to decipher anything significant in the writing on the box I soon lost interest and eventually filled the thing with bric-a-brac I found I couldn\u2019t bear to part with.<\/span>
 <\/span>
One day my father asked, \u201cWhere's the love I gave you?\u201d Being an honest child I gave him an honest answer. At that exact moment in time I had lost track of its specific location. (Afterwards I found it under my bed.)<\/span>
 <\/span>
\u201cWhat did you do with it?\u201d he also wanted to know. This time my answer was both honest and accurate.<\/span>
 <\/span>
\u201cI see,\u201d he said and then he said, \u201cLove is not a very effective tool you know \u2013 you can\u2019t build bridges with it,\u201d (and then he smiled) \u201cwell, maybe you can \u2013 but it\u2019s nice to hold and good for holding things. Shoeboxes are just like that. I\u2019ve never met a shoebox I didn\u2019t like the feel of and that I couldn\u2019t do something with.\u201d<\/span>
 <\/span>
When he died a few years later we discovered one hundred and seventy-three shoeboxes in a cupboard in his bedroom, all empty. And that made me very sad, very sad indeed.<\/span>
 <\/span>
 <\/span>

 <\/span>
*Jim Murdoch<\/span> is a Scottish writer and shoebox collector. He has a cockatiel whose entire existence revolves around pecking holes in Jim\u2019s shoeboxes. Amazon boxes are good too. You can read more about Jim at his blog <\/span>The Truth about Lies<\/span><\/a><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shoeboxes  One day my father gave me an empty shoebox. \u201cThat\u2019s love,\u201d he said and I said, \u201cThanks, Dad,\u201d and immediately went away to look for secret compartments. Finding none and being unable to decipher anything significant in the writing on the box I soon lost interest and eventually filled the thing with bric-a-brac I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}