Jetsam

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I find stuff.

For instance, this football shirt.



I don't know the sponsor. I don't actually know which bit of the UK the team are from. I don't know who left it lying on the pavement - washed and pressed - or why. All I know is, I've got a football shirt that's a bit too small for me.

And to go with the shirt, a jacket.



I found this one (I think) three years ago, lying in the gutter, in the rain, half buried under a pile of leaves. Um, the jacket was in the gutter, not me. New, it would have cost about GBP60 - not that I would ever pay half that for an item of clothing. Oh, and it fits me perfectly. As you can see, the dogs like it too.

Just one small drawback. When I'm wearing it, people tend to assume I'm
(a) a football fan
(b) scottish, and
(c) a whisky drinker.



Wheras in fact I only drink whisky occasionally with coke, my closest connection with scotland is a great-grandmother I never met, and the closest I've got to a football team was a local team player asking me to wank him off when I was sixteen.

He, uh, played for both teams.

Last month, a pair of slightly torn tracksuit bottoms/jogging trousers/sweatpants/whatever you call them.



Clean, easily mended, quite usable, and they're a good baggy fit. In fact, I had to take them off to photograph them :-S.

Once, I found a big floppy dog. Sitting on an electrical junction box.



Okay, a big floppy stuffed toy dog. Which is now the favourite toy of a small fluffy real dog - though of a toy breed, just to be confusing. The other favourite toy was a two foot long stuffed Daffy Duck - presumably dropped by a young child in a pushchair - now destroyed by four-way tugs of war between dogs with sharp teeth.

I'm sitting on an office chair that was thrown out in a house-clearing just down the street...on the same day as my previous second-hand office chair broke.



One of the wheels was missing, so we replaced it with a wheel from...the broken chair.

Somewhere in the house there's a complete set of screwdrivers and spanners in a specially designed shoulderbag, found next to a park bench at midnight. There's also a post-office shoulderbag which is exactly the right size for carrying this laptop. And there's a laptop that was new about twelve years ago, found in a skip.

I've got a warm wooley scarf that was snagged on some brambles, and last month I found mother an impromptu anniversary present - a pink patterned silk scarf, found in almost the same place.

And yesterday, somewhere to put my feet.



It's a carpet-mat from a car, and it fits snugly under this writing desk, providing just a little extra comfort and warmth, as I sit here in my found clothes - including a cheap pair of slippers which are now held together with carpet tape. Which I found somewhere.

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