What is it, I asked Sandra? It’s a tea towel holder, she explained. Look, you put loops on your tea towels and fasten them over the toes. Well, we stood looking at it for a bit, wondering if it would make a good back scratcher, though we have other ways of doing that than using a bit of white plastic in the shape of a foot. Sandra wondered what sort of a person could even think that that was something the world really, really needed.
Of course, you see a lot of that sort of thing in a flea market. Like angels with stupid grins on their faces, probably embarrassed at having to wear their nighties in public. Then there are home made clay things that are supposed to be something, but which never really are, and are usually painted as though the artist was some three year old with no taste at all and not a great deal in the eyesight department. Not that I can do any better, colouring in a picture without going too much over the lines being my limit, but then I have enough sense not to offer it for sale in a public place. Should I mention the cigarette stubbers? All right, I will. There was this little metal thing on one stall, round and just big enough to fit in the palm of your hand. It had four small tubes on the surface, each about as deep as the thickness as Sandra’s little finger, which really makes them small. You were meant to stub out your ciggie in one of these little tubes, but I could see at a glance that your average ciggie is bigger than the tube it was meant to fit, so there didn’t seem to be much sense in it at all. Besides, what idiot is going to carry one of those around, when nobody’s allowed to smoke indoors nowadays anyway?
Honestly, there’s all sorts of rubbish like that, and most of it damaged in some way. Broken books, broken locks, broken toys, broken mugs and plates. Broken dreams, more like.