I am a magpie. It’s hereditary. As a child in the Yorkshire burbs, I'd sit in my grandmother's lap, ever keen to gaze upon her monolith of photo albums. For inside each lived a family tree of market trader-cum-mafioso looking men, resplendent in wristfuls and neckfuls and fingerfuls of shiny, shiny yellow gold. I never met any of them. And yet, here they were, alive as I was, smoking and grinning over pints of the good stuff. It looked like fun. More importantly, to my innocent eyes, it looked cool.



There was something wonderfully northern about it all: the social club scene, where men drank pints, women settled for halves but both poured equal effort into the outfit of The Big Night Out. Your finest gold wasn’t there for bragging rights (who do you think you are, silly bastard?), but worn with quiet pride instead. Respect from the Terrys and Denises and Daves was a hard-earned commodity. Tougher still was getting in on a round.

Five decades on, tastes have changed. The early noughties appetite for footballers, big sunglasses and even bigger sports cars is now reviled in the brunching home counties and beyond. But in pockets of the country - in places called Willerby and Kirk Ella and Brough - gauche remains gold (as do white leather three-pieces and four-bedroomed new builds). These parts are a last bastion in which monstrous eighties flashiness still thrives, where certain displays of wealth are still applauded as evidence of hard, proper graft. Though diluted, it's a notion granted safe passage down south via my grandfather's grandson. I am northern: see me gleam.

On a recent summer’s trip to New York, the gold rush endured as I pored over an East Village feast of questionable authenticity. The sparsely-toothed market trader didn’t need to guide me across the wallpaper table - she knew she had me at ‘knuckleduster’. And there it shone, like a trophy on Don King’s nightstand: a thick, heavy sovereign complete with black meandros edging. In the centre of this hideous beauty, an onyx stone bigger and blacker than the eyes of a twenty-something in Peckham at 3am. $15 dollars she said. I’d have paid double.

I wore my new prize immediately. I loved it. My mate, Patrick, said it was absolutely vile, as did the rest of our travelling party: cause for my heart to swell bigger still. Some New Yorkers - actual proper New Yorkers - told me “I fuck so hard with that ring,” which I took to mean as a good thing. It sat happy with other gold pieces I owned (a ‘DAD’ ring with my father’s name engraved to the band, and a thicker, subtler Alex Orso geometric option).

The author’s grandparents, 1982. Mary Taylor

After a stint in Vegas and LA, the sovereign came home with me like a foreign bride: beaming, and at cultural odds with my friends and London at large. The Scandi-chic sentiment - in which everyone dresses like some form of neo Danish architect - held tight over the capital. Maximalism was, and is, decidedly off the menu. Still, my ring said otherwise, and I wore it at every special occasion and work event and impromptu drink down the pub and birthday party and, anything, really, that commanded a little more effort: the piece de resistance of my gaudy gold armoury. But it wasn’t to last.



After a heavy night out for a friend’s 30th, I arrived home, fiddled with my keys like a Rubik’s Cube then fell into my house. My hand felt a little lighter. You’re just drunk, drunk me said. You’ve lost it, sober me said the next morning. My East Village hand cannon was gone.

Maximalism was, and is, decidedly off the menu. Still, my ring said otherwise.

Losing something important is a stressful affair. But this episode was heightened; I'd not only misplaced something irreplaceable, I'd misplaced a replacement for something already irreplaceable. That ring felt like one of the few links to the men in my nana's cloudy photo albums, men who disappeared long before my arrival. Men like my grandad.

I've never been to a social club. I've never worked on a dock, or on a building site, nor was I forced to leave school as a teenager. I've never been destitute. I don't break my back on a weekly basis, with just enough left over to dissolve the oncoming threat of more unforgiving, endless graft in the bottom of a pint glass.

That life - my grandfather's life - will never be mine. I thank my parents for that. And yet, raucous, tobacco-tinged braggadocio endures in the northern gold, proud to give two knuckledustered fingers to any sneers of 'nouveau riche' (and probably an expletive you'd only hear in a flat-roof pub). Look beyond the university education and a 'very London' job, and that's who I am. You are what you wear.



The ring in question. Murray Clark

Bereft, I tried to find a replacement for the replacement. Just a few weeks ago, back in New York, I walked alone in sub-zero weather to the same East Village spot. The flea market was no longer there. No wallpaper table, no Aladdin’s Cave - just two hooded locals sharing a cigarette. I almost plucked up the courage to ask for directions until overhearing an audible mutter that sounded a lot like 'crackpipe'. My cue to leave.

And so I did, without a new sovereign on my finger. But it lives on. Not quite in a photo album. But, rather, in a WhatsApp history conversation with my mother. There, in the New York sun, is my grandfather’s grandson - now a fully-grown man that he never got to meet - holding his fist up to the camera, a yellow gold sovereign gleaming forever more on the memory of an iCloud.

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