A couple of days ago, Lady sent me a link on Facebook that purported to list the 10 most popular china patterns and how to recognize them.  Knowing full well that she was fanning the flame of my nascent blue-dish collection, she will surely be happy to know that as I was perusing the pile of chaos that is this tiny antiques shop in Kilkenny, Ireland . . .

. . . something high on the shelf caught my eye . . .

. . . could that be the “Blue Willow” pattern?  I whipped out my phone and pulled up Number 9 on the list:

I looked closer at the platter on the shelf.  Chinese folklore?  Check.  A willow and a bridge and a tea house?  Check.  I asked the shopkeeper if he would take it down so I could see whether it had the Spode name and pattern number on the bottom.  Absolutely not — at least, not unless I was serious about buying it.  So I asked him a bunch of questions about it, and he may have told me quite a bit — but his Irish accent was 98% unintelligible to me, so all I could pick out was “an old lady” and “willow” and the sale price.

So I bought it.

It’s definitely not a Spode (no telltale markings on the back), and I have no idea how old it is.  I asked the guy and all I could make out was that he it was “much older” than another set of dishes, which was “at least 80” years old.

So who knows.  I doubt it’s a treasure, but that’s just fine, because that way I won’t feel bad at all using it for ordinary use.

Oh, and does anyone know of something used to clean babies bottles?  The old man was trying to explain to me how to clean off some of the age stains and the only words that made any sense to me were “baby bottle”.