You don’t become a jeweller in a year. I’ve honed my skills and expertise over 18 years and I get so much out of it. 

One of the greatest privileges is when I’m asked to help redesign old jewellery for new wearers. The people who come to me to remodel their jewellery do so because it means a lot to them or they have a strong emotional connection to the person who gave it to them. 

I redesigned a ring recently which had been given to a granddaughter. The family were convinced it was a ruby ring, but I confess, I saw immediately it wasn’t. The gemologist confirmed it was just a piece of coloured glass, but the financial value didn’t matter because of the emotional value attached to it. This young woman wanted to wear the ring that her grandmother wore all the time but it was old-fashioned, so we set it in a pendant because she wanted to keep her grandmother physically close to her heart.

Often people use jewellery to show off their success in life. I sometimes get husbands who approach me because they want to take the modest engagement ring they gave their wife when they weren’t so well-off, and add a big diamond to celebrate their success now. 

I did one recently where it was the ring of the couple who’d met in art school, 35 years ago. They’d got engaged as students and he couldn’t afford much: a ring with three tiny diamonds, insignificant really, especially given how successful the couple had become in the art world. At first I assumed they’d want to add a big rock, but the wife said “no, absolutely not, I don’t want any of that.” She only wanted to make the ring adjustable because her fingers had become arthritic and needed to be able to get it over her knuckle and squeeze it closed. 

When she got married it was all yellow gold, but nowadays the style is white gold and platinum, but she was adamant we keep the yellow gold and those tiny diamonds. For her, those were a testament to how long they’d been married. She joked to me that the yellow gold was proof she was in the “first wives club”. 

One of the most powerful stories that came to me was from a friend who’d received jewellery from her mother-in-law who had recently passed away. Again, it was quite old-fashioned and she didn’t want to wear it how it was, but the story was important to the family. 

They were from Zimbabwe and had owned a farm for generations. When the problems started there, they fled to South Africa, but the farm kept going. 

Eventually the mob came to the farm next door and the farm manager called the owner, my friend’s father-in-law, scared for his life. The owner told him to pay all the workers severance, whatever it took to get them to safety, then go to a jewellers and buy two identical items with whatever money was left. As the manager did that, my friend’s father-in-law flew in on a little seaplane to rescue his friend and take him and his wife to South Africa.

The farm manager had purchased two diamond rings (two carat diamonds, not massive, but significant diamonds) and he gave them to the owner who gave him one back. One was for the manager’s wife, and one was for the owner’s wife. That was it. After generations in the family, that was all that was left of their farm. 

If anything, working on stories like these have taught me the importance of family and the fragility of life. We can have everything and end up with nothing, we can start from nothing and go up to everything. Jewellery can survive for centuries, even millennia if it’s looked after properly, and it can collect a hell of lot of stories in that time. Looking at that jewellery can also make people think about their family and their history.