WHAT really matters? I’m asking, you understand, because I’m not sure I know.

Of course, when it comes to the big stuff, I’m fairly certain I have it figured out. And if not quite figured out, then at least on a whiteboard somewhere, scribbled down to the common denominator stage.

Not one to wheel out old clichés because, at the end of the day, they should always be avoided like the plague, it pains me a little to admit that the internet’s great inspirational quoters strike like a broken clock sometimes. Family and good health, they espouse, and it’s not hard to agree that spending energy on most other things is as efficient as a west-coast solar panel. At this junction of the years, most of us are reminded, in one direction or the other, of what is important in the grand scheme of things. But what about in the humble scheme?

Beyond the values that line my path and the people who keep me forcibly on it, I struggle at times to recognise the meaning in the minutiae: in those tiny pebbles I’ve picked up along the way.

Not that I don’t pocket them constantly; they’re the reason I don’t take off in strong winds. As hoarders go, I’m not so much compulsive as just plain dedicated. So this week’s adventure in assembling a time capsule was an exercise not only in nostalgia but also in restraint.

The concept of time capsules has been around since the dawn of poor storage, existing initially as a method of localising landfill. But in recent times it has taken on a sentimental bent as parents and teachers, unsure of where to hang the little darlings’ inscrutable artwork but unwilling to throw it away, opted instead to entrust it to the earth’s care. Listen, I had to collect a coffer of chattels and dig a hole this week – you think I had time for proper research?

I’m pretty certain anyway that no-one from this century needs the function of a time capsule explained to them. Unless, of course, you live in Coatbridge.

Gather items of import, cram them into an appropriate tub and bury them somewhere safe for the future to find. But aye, there’s the rub: how exactly to decide which items are of import and which are barely worth their weight in scrap. It all depends, I suppose, on the intended target for the unearthing. Many of the most considered capsules of the past have been planted with the expectation of centuries or even millennia in the waiting. But if there’s anything you should know by now about my adventures, it’s that they’re about as well thought out as a Hogmanay Old Firm game, so if a tenacious squirrel doesn’t exhume it in three months’ time, I’ll have done better than expected. Credit banked where it’s due, though, I invested some smarts – and a not unattractive penny – in a proper time capsule container, although I expect its fide will eventually be judged how bona it lasts. On first glance, I wasn’t convinced that entrusting my life’s anthology to the bluest of plastic cylinders, but the box mentioned Nasa and this innocent was convinced. I’m nothing if not gullible, which isn’t, in case you weren’t aware, in the dictionary.

The obvious first contributions to my collection were the most general. The front page of a suitably trustworthy newspaper to mark both the date of committal and the headlines that described that date. A crisp, OK, polymer, £5 note, undeniably sterling, which might, in time, determine its worth.

A few leaflets and business cards of current significance; some receipts showing prices of that which we deem necessary presently; and a list of the most popular culture crazes of the moment.

But there’s only so much outward-looking you can do without eventually staring at the back of your own head, so soon there was only room left to decide what of my present I would choose to gift to my future. My 2016 diary seemed appropriate since, without its scrawled addenda, this last year would have been buried in a pit of confusion and I imagine that in a decade I’ll find how I spent my 36th year either amusing or depressingly familiar.

Outsourcing the workload, I asked my husband and closest relatives to pen messages to older me or to that pesky squirrel. Today me promised not to read them and to my surprise, I kept my word, dropping them unopened into the capsule’s confines with the kind of curiosity that would have taken down a cougar. Next in were the inevitable photographs – wing-walking, life-modelling, bee-keeping – small-time achievements of which I’m big-time proud, all saved to a memory stick for the sake of space. And if technology moves on, as it invariably does, there will be the extra history lesson of trying to source a machine that will load them.

For the sake of completion – since otherwise how would it end? – I jotted down one or two predictions on a sheet of patterned notepaper, foretelling everything and nothing from the state of world politics to the first lunar stag-do. Well, it worked for Nostradamus.

On top of it all, its lustre and message untarnished, I added a bright pink Yes badge, in the hope it will provide a poignant reminder of a time before our freedom was a reality.

Sure, I could have traipsed out into the wilderness, marked the co-ordinates with GPS or an old-school wooden pointer, and left the rest to fate and nature, but I guess I wasn’t quite ready for such abandonment quite yet.

Besides, where better to plant what matters to you most than safely in your own back garden?