IT is a thing of delicacy now; frail and faded, crumbling at the edges, each page falling limply, yellowed and stained by the passing of years.

It was old when I was born, it was even old when my grandmother was born, but still it survives, albeit on life-support - and it talks to us of a world in which none of us lived, an alien place that existed where we now walk.

It is a copy of The Abergavenny Chronicle and Monmouthshire Advertiser and on Friday, May 27th, 1881 it had a lot to tell the people in our fair corner of the land - and all for a penny.

In 1881 the first Boer War went badly for Britain, the Sunday Closing Act prohibited the sale of alcohol in Wales on the sabbath; Ernest Bevin came into the world, Benjamin Disraeli left it and Billy the Kid escaped from prison.

Reading the stories and advertisements one is struck by how fundamentally different their world was. Any time traveller who believed a suit of Victorian clothes and an appropriate haircut would be enough to pass themselves off as a native would quickly come unstuck trying to navigate the complexities of custom and manners.

As novelist LP Hartley famously said, ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ Just how differently can be established by even the most cursory of glances through the pages.

There were no languid soaks in a warm tub with candles and chocolate; an advert stated ‘Sinclair’s Cold Water Soap will get you nice and clean without the misery of a steamy house,’ which suggests bath time in winter was at best character-building.

For the fitness conscious, the publication ‘How to Ensure Health’ was available by mail order and for a shilling it promised cures for, ‘Loss of energy, self-disgust, dizziness, a love of solitude, indecision, groundless fear and many peculiarities affecting the female sex.’

If you were of a stouter constitution, however, they maybe you would be up for a weekend of carousing - and why not with rye whiskey at £2 for a dozen bottles and finest pale ale at 1/6 (seven and a half pence) per gallon.

It all sounds fine until one scans the situations vacant where a position for a ‘Healthy young man’ is advertised at a timber yard offering a weekly wage of 13/7d (67 pence) which is around twice what a maidservant would expect to clear for a working week of 80 hours or more.

The articles are a mix of local, national and international news with space also given over for fiction, helpful hints and even poetry.

Among the national and international news are stories headlined, ‘Extraordinary Railway Accident at Crystal Palace’, ‘Assault on Lord Thynne’ and ‘A French Gentleman in Trouble.’

For lovers of romantic fiction there are Chapters Seven and Eight of ‘A Terrible Secret,’ by May Agnes Fleming and a lengthy (by modern standards) feature entitled ‘The First and Last Kiss of Michael Angelo’.

But it is in the local news that we see the greatest distinction between our world and theirs. There is the story of the Blaenavon man, fined five shillings for not sending his child to school on the grounds that the seven-year-old did not have any clothes at all.

The South Breconshire Board of Guardians relieved seventy vagrants in the previous week and Ann Kitchener, a tramp, was charged with stealing a shawl worth 75p.

A Brynmawr man called Maggs was charged with affray but was too busy working to attend court, so he sent his wife who was subsequently fined five shillings for using unladylike language whilst under oath.

A reader’s letter signed ‘A Poor Ratepayer of Crickhowell’ bemoans the fact that the local workhouse union, when in need of several articles of furniture, chose to buy them from a firm in London instead of using local tradesmen. The writer, clearly with a vested interest, states, ‘Such conduct is highly reprehensible and deserves to be roundly condemned.’

The paper contained illustrations but no photographs and was slightly shorter and broader than its modern descendant, being almost square. Instead of conventional pages the whole thing unfolded into a huge and ungainly sheet measuring almost a square metre.

The paper would have been eagerly consumed as the primary source of local information by the 85% of people who were both literate and understood English and by the 70% of local children who regularly attended school.

Through its pages readers would learn of events taking place on the other side of town and the other side of the world, they would, like us, have voiced their opinions on the great and the good, acclaimed their heroes and denounced the dunderheads.

The paper would have confronted the decision makers, challenged the civic leaders and been the catalyst for a hundred heated discussions in the inns, pews and households of the county - just as a good local paper should.

And in writing this, one can’t help but wonder whether some unnamed scribe as yet unborn will, in 2153, be holding a copy of this Chronicle, shaking his or her head and chuckling at the eccentricities of our antiquity.

But with the world now fragmented into digital bytes, stored on clouds, uploaded, downloaded and side-shunted into virtual filing cabinets 50,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, the antique can still speaks to us, surprise us - and remind us where we came from and who we really are.