I'm glad that kid didn't whinge tonight.


I remember as a child not really having enough money to do...anything. No social activities, not school trips, no holidays, no hotels or sports or anything. No decent clothes. I don't mean brand, I mean clothes that fit properly, that didn't get me laughed at every day.

Actually, I suppose my dungarees with the monkey on the front could actual work these days but I was five and it was the eighties. My fashion faux pais were even worse and more subtle after wards. My hair, terrible. My friends were kind of in middle income families and Christmas wasn't exactly anything I'd like to talk about to anyone. I just couldn't do anything. No digital slr's, no consoles, just bad jumpers.

"What did you get?" would have me trying to scurry under a rock.

Having fun on no budget is tricky. Most of the people around my area took to crime at some point, and it's kind of heart rending seeing other people moving along nicely and you just stuck there, worlds away.


I have a cardigan from when I was ten if anyone wants one (Not really)


The irony?


When I was twelve my sisters then boyfriend gave me some binoculars this guy at Le Mans gave him to use, then said he could keep. Great, binoculars. (Didn't take long till my possession of binoculars was found out. Oh dear that wasn't a nice month). They were big and heavy and pretty boring, so when one of my friends said "Can I borrow them for the trip to Kielder?" I said yes, and off he went. When he came back he said that, the ranger they had been with, had immediately come over to him and said that they were very expensive and asked if they were his dad's. He told him who they belonged to and he had laughed and refused to believe it.

Understand that this was a time before the internet that most of you grew up with. It would take another three years before anyone but the very rich would have the net in their homes on their horrible beige monstrosities. Another two years before it was totally hyped on TV as 'Somewhere you could order pizzas from with your computer' (That was the original media pitch, trust me) I didn't have a computer anyway, but the point is, my idea of expensive was fifty pounds or something equally unobtainable. Point is that their was no way for me to check how much they were worth.

So I threw them in a box.

A year ago I remembered them. There had been some foxes in the garden and I wanted to take a look, and for some bizarre reason decided to check what they were like on the internet (You know how we humans need others opinions to validate our lives).

Turns out they were thirty years old, and the irony?

The were worth £1500, sitting in a box for the last eighteen years and only emerging triumphant when the battle was already lost.


That was a lot of cinema tickets, jujitsu lessons, school trips, and actually being able to look a person in the eye.

But they were good binoculars ^.^

End.


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