My grandfather had identical rings made for his immediate family, and when he and his wife died their rings were handed on to my brother and me.
The 4 people left in the family only ever meet up once every 5 years or so, and this photo was taken at our last meeting, in Scotland in 2003.
They are signet rings, and they actually work - I once used mine to seal a letter to a lover with wax. Despite what the rings may say about my ancestor's social pretensions, I am proud to wear mine, especially here at the other end of the earth from my surviving family.
The design of the signet uses a Huguenot crest: rose, heart and cross. Once, I was on holiday in a 400-year-old French farmhouse, with a group of free range actors, bikers, musicians and head-cases (I'm not saying which group I identified with, but I don't bike or act, and I left my ukulele at home). At the time, I was breaking up with Angie, and trying to sell our flat in Glasgow via phone from France.
Anyway, under the old farmhouse kitchen, there was a dark dank cellar. And in the cellar floor there was a flagstone you could lift, leading to a tiny cell called a priest's hidey-hole. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, genocidal French catholics chased most of the Huguenots out of the country, but a few brave souls chose to go into hiding in hidey-holes like this one.
To relieve his boredom, one of these fugitives had spent weeks or months carving this crest into the stone wall of the cell. When I saw that his handiwork matched my ring, I knew I was in the right place at the right time.
It is hundreds of years since the catholics chased these people into hiding, but some things never change. I know a catholic buddhist meditator who chases bliss in a cell.
