brasso

Clearing out my garage I found a box of stuff from 1984 when I first set off teaching, throwing everything in the house into either the basement or the garage before I rented it out.  Some boxes never bear looking at, but sometimes they surprise.  

I found 5 Brasso tins,  2 Silvos, a bottle of blueing and a box of starch.  I must have been an obsessive housekeeper at one time.  This Brasso tin appears so heroic, imperial, brave; nothing like the version we get now.  I would have bought it at the corner store, Chinese-run, pressed tin ceiling, next door to the Inglewood Café, Chinese-run, pressed tin ceiling, both found in every neighbourhood and every small town in western Canada.   The corner store today is Suzie Q's beads, and the café is the Spice Road Merchant. Such are the perils of gentrification, and we can't buy a quart of milk in this neighbourhood unless it is organic and $5/litre.

Brasso was made by Reckitt and Colman in Montreal.  Colman was the mustard company and Reckitt was the starch manufacturer.  How do I know such things?  They are just there in my childhood memory of household packaging.  It is curious when one finds that such artefacts look so old, from some other historic era.  1984 wasn't that long ago, it isn't as if this tin was from the 1920s, but somehow I don't think the design had changed much – there is a British Empire feel to it.  

The knurled lid is a nice touch.  There is a whole industry reproducing such tins – a Restoration Hardware sort of product, making our domestic lives more interesting in this era of photoshopped and illustratored graphics.  I doubt the repro tins come with Brasso in them.