January 24, 2026 Categories Reading time: 3 minutes
Oh nice, a blogging challenge, sort of. I saw this post on David’s blog titled "What is the oldest thing you own", which is a reply to someone else’s post, and I thought I’d write a reply to that, too. Looking around, I realise I don’t have many really old things in my possession. I have a lot of old things because I like buying used and I generally like old books, records, tech etc., but most of what I have was still manufactured during my lifetime. But there are still a few items which are older than that.
This camera used to be my Dad’s, and in fact it still is, but he will never use it again and he has the habit of sometimes just throwing stuff out, so I thought it might be best to prevent this from ending up in the trash by taking it home with me. He got it as a present from my mum as far as I know, but I’m not sure when. The first pictures that exist of me were taken with this camera, so it’s definitely older than me. I guess it’s from the late 70s. It’s a pretty simple camera, but this also means there isn’t much that can break and it still works perfectly.
In the 90s, everybody was buying CDs and getting rid of their vinyl records, so as a teenager with not a lot of money I enjoyed going to flea markets and second hand record stores to buy used vinyls, which were dirt cheap back then. You could get 6 or 7 albums for the price of one new CD, which was pretty nice. And since I like music from the 70s and 80s, that worked out great for me. I still have all these old records, and some of them date back to the early 70s, like this one. This is Uriah Heep’s first album "...Very ’Eavy ...Very ’Umble" from 1970.
I think this is the oldest thing I have. A book of logarithm tables, which you needed to have as a mathematician or engineer in the age before electronic calculators. I’m not sure where I got this from anymore; maybe I found it at University when some department was clearing out it’s library or archive. It was printed in 1943, during the second world war. I guess they needed a lot of engineers back then to build weapons and other war machinery. Thankfully there are no swastikas in this one.
So now, over to you! What’s the oldest thing you own? Put it in a post and feel free to tag me or send me the link!
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