The nostalgia of the weekend has led me to think over other times from my largely forgotten childhood. For some reason one memory sticks out: Me and David Golledge getting hold of a box of matches when we were 11 and then becoming overcome with terror of what would happen if any of our parents found them. None of us wanted to take them home again, so a cunning plan was hatched.
We were to go to the woods near David's house, and Genie them. Now, I had never heard the phrase 'to genie' a box of matches before, and I never have since. But I was assured that it meant you take a match out, light it, and then set fire to the whole box of them. Of course being 11 I nodded along trying to give the impression I had been Genieing boxes of matches for months now, and was in fact developing something of a psychological reliance on it. I'm pretty sure David fell for it.
Anyway, we sneaked out to those woods to do the terrible deed, widely anticipating it to be the coolest thing we'd ever seen. It did - of course given such hype - turn out to be a big let down. And I didn't think of it ever again. That is until yesterday, when I was browsing the BBC News website and saw that David had been sentenced to four years in jail for burning down an East London match factory.
Imagine if the (admittedly fictional) fire had killed him! That would've been a match made in heaven I tell you...
No comments:
Post a Comment