Anything – including me – eventually needs a bit of polish.  Polish is what brightens things up, maybe straightens the parts or removes a scuff or scratch. Everything material – and perhaps the immaterial – occasionally requires a moment’s attention. The undertaking, while not wasteful, is guaranteed to be deliberately indulgent and more dutiful than restorative.  We know that wear and tear is expected.  Indeed the more romantic description of age and oxidization as patina is commonplace. Having a jeweller “buff” a trinket of gold to restore its original sheen or gloss is a fleeting remedy. Soon further polish will be de rigueur. Again the need will arise to discharge the dust, the film; the need to reanimate the initial scope and attraction, to put things in order, the detailed car in the garage, the accessories in the walnut box with the velvet layers, the cameras and binoculars in their soft leather cases, the rest can go back on the desk or the shelf where they will gather more from time and the air, as we do ourselves after a shower or an evening in fancy dress.

The polished patina never quite perfectly resembles the original. Nor, in my opinion, should it. Yet there are some who, unable to resist the glitter and shine of something new, succumb to the bait and move on, discarding the bruised and weathered piece. Others dilute the incentive by insisting the two are different, that the new is somehow better than the old. Though not a fiction, it circulates the cause without acknowledging the advantage. Polishing is an engagement, an act of critical employment, a psychiatric performance to enable understanding and to withdraw confession and absolution.

As we tenderly move our hands about the things we polish, we cannot escape the liability to ponder the object, to sense its weight, to recall its emotional gravity and thence to restore it, invigorated, to its display. Thereafter the advantage of the venture is apparent, as we stop from our retreat to revisit a glance, an assessment, an approbation of the relief and commendation. Looking at old photographs engenders many of the identical persuasions.

But nothing we consume will forever remain before our eyes except by such evocation of memories and drifting thoughts. What instead we may preserve by polishing is as close as we shall get to where we were going. It is for this reason that we preserve and polish the gems in our life.