I’m Edmund de Waal. I’m a potter. What I’ve got in front of me, it’s about 14 inches high by the look of it. It’s German, it’s 17th-, early 18th-century and it’s a completely maverick, idiotic, crazy bit of glass. Because what you’ve got is a sort of stag, in full flight, above a beautiful bell-shaped glass; it’s a cartoon reindeer, really. The only colour that there is, is on the mouth of the animal and on its antlers, which are beautiful sort of blue. I’m going to lift up the stag element very, very, very carefully, all the way up. It’s surprisingly heavy. What on earth is this for?

This is a puzzle glass, it’s part of a strange cultural thing, where you would enjoy your great banquets, where you would fill something up and pass it round and say to people, you know, “how do you drink out of this?”, and of course it’s almost impossible to work out how to drink from this stag glass. I’m going to put this very, very gingerly back on. You can hear it going down over its sort of spine of glass. There you go. And then you would have to work out how to drink your wine. So what would you do? Well you would pick it up and you would try and drink it from the glass itself. That wouldn’t work. Then you would try and drink it from the mouth of the stag and that wouldn’t work. Then, if you were very clever, you’d find that way down here at the ball underneath, holding the glass together, there are, somewhere here, some very small apertures which if you put your fingers over them and made a vacuum, then suddenly you’d be able to put your lips to the stag’s mouth and finally get your wine. It’s extraordinary.

And I’m just thinking, as I put that in, you’ll have been out hunting. You’ll be in some great schloss somewhere or some castle, with great sort of hunting trophies on the wall, and all your talk will have been about the day out in the field or the forest, and there you have, you know, as part of the end of your day at court, this stag, so it kind of rounds off your day and it’s a great sort of comic, heraldic, beautiful 400 year-old joke - it’s gorgeous.

I’m Edmund de Waal. I’m a potter.

Okay, so you have to imagine being some enormously luxurious gentleman, about to start the day, and you have this brought in – it’s a toilet set, a shaving set. And look how extraordinary it is. We’ve got beautiful silver strap work going all the way around this deep, glorious, lustrous tortoiseshell. And here is the silver stopper, which when you push it, opens up with a beautiful, simple latch; it just opens perfectly. Inside is a purple velvet interior completely like it would have been 300 years ago. And then coming up out of this, this casket, are these extraordinary objects, which invite you to pull them up and have a look.

And the first one that comes up is a silver mirror with a beautiful cornelian at the top, so finely cut that it’s translucent. And then a double-sided comb, completely perfect. It doesn’t look like it’s been used; it looks like it’s just come from the makers. This is different people working together here: this is a silversmith, a casket-maker, someone who works with bone. This comb, I have to say, is so beautiful I don’t want to put it down. And then scissors. And then this is the blunt hone stone on which you would sharpen your razor. And what’s so extraordinary about this, you can see that it’s been worn away.

The next thing out is this cut-throat razor. And of course I am going to run my thumb down its blade and it is unbelievably sharp. You could use this now and it would be the best shave you’d ever have. That’s extraordinary.

And then there are five more things. Another razor, of a different shape, also tortoiseshell. They're all ridiculously sharp and they all seem to be the same. Did he have one razor for every day of the week? What happened? Or is it just, that you just fill your whole box with a lifetime's full of razors. I don't know. I'm closing it up again just to hear this wonderful snap.