Glove 10
| WHEN | 8/1/1 12.50pm |
| WHERE | Haddenham, Bucks |
| HAND | Either |
| DESCRIPTION | Brown with green diamond pattern. Either a small child's or lady's. Wool. Gnawed possibly by a dog |
I'd gone out to Buckinghamshire to visit my friend Julie who, just before Christmas, had fallen off her horse and broken her collar bone. She was staying with her folks in the house she grew up in, the room she was born in, even. She wanted to work on her relationship with them and also to save up some money for a deposit for a flat. I got a train and we decided to walk for about half an hour to this great little pub and where we'd have us a fine lunch. I told Julie about the gloves and she said I was mad, but it would be interesting to see my results. She saw my point about being lost though, and suggested I should try and hand myself in to a lost property office, to see if Kitty would ever come to collect me. This made us laugh for a couple of hundred yards as we made our way along an unsidewalked country lane. And then we did the 'ah' of two people dismissing the same idea at the same time. I like Julie a lot.
One of the first things that attracted me to her was her gloves in fact. I'd noticed her at a Christmas party a few years ago (she is a very beautiful woman as well as most serene and elegant) and we both ended up leaving at the same time. Accidentally? Maybe not, but by chance we found ourselves getting the same tube. She wore these neat black leather gloves which were exactly right for her, and I decided I would get to know her. After a little bit of research through the hostess of the party, I got her number and while I don't think she ever really fancied me, her friendship has always been something very dear to me.
Kitty and I went to her birthday drinks party after work one night when we were together, and Kitty excused herself early. Julie and I ended up having a drunken late meal and it was good. Kitty was always jealous of old female friends of mine, even though I loved her more deeply, she felt I'd loved people like Julie longer and that somehow lessened her love for me.
Does a glove find itself jealous of a ring. Or a watch? Just because they've spent more time on the hand of the person, does it mean that they love them more?
No. Because a glove makes the person warm. It makes the person happy to face the outside on days when conditions would make them want to stay inside otherwise. The glove protects the person from the thorns of roses, the stings of nettles, the brutality of cricket balls, the splinters of carpentry, the acid of chemistry, the chafing of driving. It can be there for the glamour of opera and the fun of snowballs. It is what we need, when we need it.
And I should say, the largest part of glove is, I remind you, love.
I continued collecting gloves through the winter and maybe I should have put them all up here too. There are about twenty including one I found one in Majorca in February. I've moved house this year and they all came with me in a big Rymans carrier bag, and scanning them in tonight to put up on the site has brought a lot of things back. They do look so sad on their own, but here let them be remembered for always.
Oh, and if you recognise one of them, email me to claim them? I've looked after them well.
So Irene wasn't the one either. Now in January I met Lily. She was just as fabulous as Kitty when we met. We had fun. She made me laugh. She chucked me by the end of February but we stayed friends. Weirdly this was at a drinks party where she saw Kitty for the first time and told me that Kitty had been giving her looks all evening. Anyway, after the chuckage Lily and I stayed friends and in August she told me we should just get back together and that I was her Mr Right. She chucked me again before September was out.
So apart from those two separate months with Lily, and the half week with Irene, I spent the year alone. A lost glove. Or maybe the unlost one. I'm still undecided.
So what did I learn that winter? Well, first and foremost, I learnt that people lose a lot of gloves. At least ten. All odd. All alone. From my sample, I'd say that 50% of lost gloves are right hand ones, 20% are left handed and the other 30% are undetermined. That says something. And the fact that I never found matching gloves says something too. Doesn't it?
Really the only thing tha's for sure is that it doesn't matter how much love you put into something, there's a chance that it will slip from your grasp unless you hold onto it every moment of every day. You have to wear it all the time if you really don't want to stand a chance of losing it. But whether that's gloves or girls, or anything else for that matter, you simply can't hold on to it all the time and if something is destined or is determined to slip away, if it wants to be lost by you, it always will be. You can't tell just by looking at the pair which glove's going to be lost, but believe me, one of them will be.
One of the reasons I'm only finishing this now, just about a year on is that I didn't really want to return to this story. I wouldn't let myself open the bag and look at the lone gloves again. And it's odd, but writing it tonight, the Saturday before Bonfire Night 2001 when the sky is getting repeatedly acned by bangers sent up and bursting and thinking of all the people out there watching the fireworks and aahing and oohing, I'm missing Kitty terribly.
It's cold tonight and I'm sure
there are people out there wearing gloves.
And they're standing with the ones they love.
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