Handbags at dawn
This is a post about something so trivial and irrelevant that I’m going to hope to god no-one reads the kind of drivel I write.
It struck me last night that cycling is good thinking time, and one thing that has been occupying my mind more than anything else lately, is what to write on this blog. And despite the fact that I am convinced no-one reads it apart from me, I still write as if I’m talking to the world at large. Why is that? I think it’s easier to write if you pretend you have an audience, really. And posting musings and scribblings on the internet allows me the luxury of publishing my nonsense without having to be answerable for it.
Then I remembered something that I had been discussing with a couple of very wonderful friends that I have, on a recent jaunt down to Hastings to watch the bonfire. Has anyone been to Hastings bonfire? It’s very dark, and fiery, and heathen. And they burn crosses on the beach. The fireworks are phenomenal, particularly when very stoned, which I was. Anyway, I had a green bag with me. I have three handbags. I’m not really a handbag person. Someone I work with can’t leave the house unless her handbag matches her shoes, her nails and her underwear (possibly exaggerating there, but I wouldn’t be surprised). I couldn’t live that way. I’d be constantly on the search for new and varied bags with which to brighten up the world a little.
It struck me, while I was wandering down the road with my two companions, that I was having some difficulty in locating something inside my bag, which isn’t large by any stretch of the imagination. One of my other handbags is the Mary Poppins Bag from Hell – you actually have to pretend to it that you’re looking for something else if you are to have any hope of unearthing what it is you really want. My green bag doesn’t normally behave like this, but I’ve noticed that since Glastonbury, where the above mentioned MPBfH first made its evil intentions clear, all my handbags have started hiding things from me. One of my friends said that her handbags also tend to do this. It’s quite distressing*. Is there a cure?
*particularly if you are desperate for the loo, and instead of yielding up your house keys, your handbag presents you with, variously, a cigarette lighter, a loose tampon, a handful of euros and a little tub of lip balm.
October 30th, 2004 at 12:54 pm
Oh yes, I go to the bonfire most years, its always struck me as a bit fudal in some ways (village rivalry and all that). I think next year is scheduled to be an extreemly big one in Hastings, (10th aniversary of the bonfire society)
http://www.20six.co.uk/johnhumphries
August 4th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
[...] As importantly, displaying them gets you waved through all of the roadblocks on the way out of the city without having to stop and irritate anyone within a 2 mile radius with a futile search for your driving license, which is somewhere in your bottomless handbag. [...]