It happened roughly some time around one of the blindspots of my vast historical knowledge that, if compared in an analogy to a woolen jumper, would look like one that hadn’t been knit yet – just a single raspberry-red thread, going straight from top to bottom (I also have a blind spot on knitting), but it definitely happened after romans (and so after greeks) but before all the horses, castles, bearded fellas in chainmail, and dragons. Speaking of which – when was the last time anyone sent you a real chainmail? Everything’s so virtual nowadays.

What I’m talking about, though, is the word “chest”. During what we shall call the golden age of one of the historical blind spots of yours truly, people used to carry their belongings in their chests. As all good farm type people did at the time, they would wake up around what we shall call “the coo-coo time” (before 10am, or, very likely, even earlier than that because they hadn’t established a good food chain and so had to work their asses and other animals off to make even a single a loaf of bread; it was also dark, cold, and damp most of the time due to the absence of atomic electricity), have a good long yawn, and then go on to take their hearts and lungs out. Once enough free space was gained in their chests, they proceeded to fill them with valuables – funny looking sticks, badly printed monopoly money, moulded loafs of bread and whatever else they had been sleeping on the previous night. It was way before words like “bling-bling” and “scarcity” came to being, so valuables were valuable, so to speak, in the eye of the beholder. If they ran out of space in the chest, that is. The morning ritual didn’t take long, and the extracted organs were placed in dressers where they were dressed up beautifully, and then put under a lock that, everyone knew, wouldn’t had really posed a challenge to a determined wolf, as locks were simple and wolves were smart back in the day. But that’s why they had trained the boys-crying-wolf for, and so only other animal to fear would be the dog, and dogs very quite daft those days. Cats, if you are wondering, were still swimming in the ocean.

Apart from reaping and sowing (which didn’t work at all because causality was all backwards and people ended up sowing what they reaped), people liked to sing songs, and chat about weather and plague.