Putting Thought into Meaningless things
On my way home from the City I noticed a bottle rolling around the floor of the train. And empty wine bottle, but a bottle all the same. It would have been just another bottle if not for the card attatched to it, filled with about four or five scrawled signatures. I found it slightly sad that a bottle that had had some thought put into it - and not the usual "Friday! WOOOOO! Drinkdrinkdrink! WOOOOO!" thought - had been abandoned. It had meant something to somebody, sometime, this bottle.
It had probably been a gift.
Reminded me of the time we were all about fifteen, zitty and awkward, and pooled our money to purchase a birthday gift for certain Andrea. It was a cd, if I recall correctly. I also recall the look on her face when she first laid her eyes on the cd - she was torn between dismay and enchantment, but not literally.
It is the look one gets when one realises that there will only be this one gift - even thought it might be Offspring and all. Thing is, the gift set us all back a month's allowance. (Except for the poor one in our quartet who probably had to go without food, or shoes for a month, maybe sell her spleen on the blackmarket which if true would have been very sad indeed) - but I suppose Andrea would have preferred five cheap gifts as opposed to that one co-op gift. Maybe she thought us insensitive.
In retrospect, we were insensitive. On the other hand, in retrospect al-so, she wasn't our freind. We might have shared some common interest, like Offspring, or her cable tv, or her cd player, but apart from that, very little was known about Andrea. One day, she was there, next to us having her allotted school-lunch aloo pie; the next, nothing.
It was rumoured that she was a hairy woman, but then again, I could be romanticizing.
It had probably been a gift.
Reminded me of the time we were all about fifteen, zitty and awkward, and pooled our money to purchase a birthday gift for certain Andrea. It was a cd, if I recall correctly. I also recall the look on her face when she first laid her eyes on the cd - she was torn between dismay and enchantment, but not literally.
It is the look one gets when one realises that there will only be this one gift - even thought it might be Offspring and all. Thing is, the gift set us all back a month's allowance. (Except for the poor one in our quartet who probably had to go without food, or shoes for a month, maybe sell her spleen on the blackmarket which if true would have been very sad indeed) - but I suppose Andrea would have preferred five cheap gifts as opposed to that one co-op gift. Maybe she thought us insensitive.
In retrospect, we were insensitive. On the other hand, in retrospect al-so, she wasn't our freind. We might have shared some common interest, like Offspring, or her cable tv, or her cd player, but apart from that, very little was known about Andrea. One day, she was there, next to us having her allotted school-lunch aloo pie; the next, nothing.
It was rumoured that she was a hairy woman, but then again, I could be romanticizing.
