The story starts with furniture, or maybe it starts with our move to mid-Wales three years ago. We moved from a small terrace to a converted chapel, and even though we stored a friends furniture and belongings while he sorted out his new house we rattled about a place that felt big and empty in comparison to our previous home. Bit by bit more furniture was collected from junk shops, saleroom and the local recycling skip where anything can be had for a fiver at most and often less. Perhaps the best bargain was a five pound, Edwardian mirror backed sideboard. It's only real fault were a couple of small holes in the back, and missing drawer handles. I found it on the day I was going to pick my wife up from the train after a visit to her daughter. In fact I only just made it to the station on time as it took a few minutes to work out the best way to get both bits of a big piece of furniture into a Ford Focus.
I'm not the fastest or most enthusiastic diy-er, the missing drawer handles waited for motivation to strike. It took nearly two years for me to start looking for replacements on e-bay. As I wanted to cover the ghostly outline of the original handles, I took one of the drawers out to measure more easily. When I came to put it back I noticed a crumpled piece of paper or card stuck in the framing behind. The foreign object was a photograph, faded and torn with one word on the back, Ganllwyd.
