The things people tell you...

Over the last week 3 people have told me an interesting story about themselves - tiny vignettes that were wonderful.

I confided to a workmate that I had always wanted a Morris Minor. She confessed her grandfather had one and when she was a schoolgirl he and one of his mates would pick her and her sisters up from school every afternoon. Grandad was elderly and didn't trust the indicators that popped out of the centre pillar and to turn right would stick his arm out the window waving it up and down. His mate in the passenger seat didn't trust the indicators or Grandad's signalling and would wave his arm, finger pointing, in big sweeps from left to right over his head inside the car. All the girls would gringe and sink down in the back seat, hiding until they got home.

Another friend told me about how his father made his own lures in the back shed. Like most men and their sheds it's somewhere for him to go for Secret Men's Business. This was alright, until one day he was showing off his lures. His wife commented on how pretty the colours he had painted them were, and that she had a fingernail polish just like that one...and that one...and that one... Friend told her she shouldn't worry unless her lipstick went missing!

Some experiments are based on a good thought and a dose of luck. Others, well... It has been so hot lately another friend's husband and brother became convinced that if they put a can of condensed milk on the roof it would only take a day to turn into caramel. So...they left it there for a fortnight just to make sure. The top and the bottom metamorphosed - the middle just couldn't manage it!

In the morning..

Every morning I walk to work. I walk past the Vet and the pushbike shop, past an electrical shop, a fish and chip shop, a framer, laundrette and a haberdashery, past a chemist and a couple of banks, past the police station, the courthouse and a solicitor's office, past the post office and finally the picture theatre.

This morning, on the footpath outside the courthouse, was a photograph torn into tiny pieces. Not scattered but like someone had stood and calmly tore it up and then just dropped it. I wanted to stop and pick up the little bits of someone else's life and see what they disliked so much, who they now hated. I didn't. There were other people walking past and I didn't want them to see me unable to control my curiosity.

I find it so hard to throw away photographs, even bad ones. It's easy to understand why some aborigines think a part of your soul is captured when a photograph is taken. But it's more than that - it's the first form of time travel.