cheap at half the price

Today I bought a pond yacht.

Sometimes, in a shop like this, I feel as if I am buying memories , money for another’s dreams. Is that sick ? Sometimes I wonder why people want to sell the things they do. Sometimes it makes me sad. Sometimes it makes me feel cheap.

A lady walked in, head-down-out-of-the-rain-street-wet as the bell freak jangled. Some people grimace , some people light up at the steel on brass ring, it takes all sorts. I am used to it. She was smart and well dressed in a contrived Boden sense. It didn’t make me want to tuck my shirt in , but I did turn the music down a little . (The Magnetic Fields , perfect detail …69 love songs, love letters in music ). She had short brown hair. Soft at her neck. I would have liked to have had a head like that, a head suited to short hair, but I haven’t . She looked in my eyes , closely, eye to eye , back and forth like an actress in love. She told me her Father had just ‘passed away’. That’s always a phrase that grates and makes me want to laugh inappropriately. Of course I didn’t, and I wasn’t glad her Dad was dead. She wore a chenille scarf, I imagined unravelling it and rubbing the velvet skeins across my top lip. She reminded me of a mouse , but a confident mouse, small, well presented, contained. She smelt of soap. I felt she had order in her life. That’s something I admire, but never quite aspire to. Her polish gave me a wayward feeling.

” The yacht was my fathers , he made it with my Grandfather, in the late 1930’s, they used to sail it. ” Her eyes wandered past me into the shop, ” it’d go well in here ”.

I am taken by things that have been made for love rather than money. When time was slow, when ‘electric’ was new . I like things made in sheds , with fingers, with care .We went out to her car and she opened the boot. It lay on it’s side, capsized. A beautiful wooden hull, dusty dark. Hollow heavy. With two huge masts beside it and a cotton bundle which held rolled up, stitched-tiny, canvas sails.

From floor to tip of mast it reaches my chin. I think of a small boy peeling wood glue from his fingers like skin and a man in white shirt sleeves looking for detail. Lives and dreams bound up in stuff. A boat, a ship , a dream that works.

They built it to sail.

I hope someone buys it to sail too.