It's my elder daughter's 18th birthday today, and one of the things I did on the day she was born was buy a copy of every national UK newspaper plus the local ones for Colchester. I put these in a box, and over the course of the next five years my wife and I added all sorts of bric-a-brac to it, from growth charts to pictures she drew, from a tiny pair of shoes to the words she learned to read at nursery school. Old birthday cards, poems written to her by her grandma — the first five years of her life were in that box.
Then, on the day before her 5th birthday, I wrote her a letter, sealed the box up and put it in the attic. There it remained, unopened and secret, until today.
Oh, the letter was because you can never predict the future, and I could have been struck dead by lightning before she reached 18. In it, I told her how much I loved her, so if anything did happen then at least she'd know that when she finally opened the box.
We rather overspent on presents this year, I think, what with its being Jenny's official coming of age. Even so, out of everything she received, I'd like to think that the box was the most special.
Watching her open it was my younger daughter, who now knows there's a box in the attic with her name on it, too...