Lyn and I both dribble, and use teatowels to keep our chins dry. I’ve always done it: they are far more effective than tissues, or anything else. We have quite an assorment, acquired from all sorts of places. When we need to, we buy new ones from shops, as one normally would. Yet we also seem to pick them up, from time to time. For example, I ‘acquire’ bar towels from pubs, or used to when I frequented such places. It often happens without noticing: I have a habit, probably a bad one, of grabbing the nearest towel, mopping up my dool, and taking it with me.

One such cloth caught my attention today. I think we acquired it a year or so ago, at a paraorchestra rehearsal up in north London. Lyn was using it. It had hand drawn pictures of children: according to it’s boarder, it commemorated the millenium. I assume it is just one of those souvenir towels where teachers get kids to draw selfportraits, which are then compiled to produce a towel for their parents to buy. As such, this towel probably meant something to someone once, yet a decade and a bit on, it was discarded in the kitchen of a church hall. It does not record who created it, so I find myself wondering how it got there, and who the crudely-drawn faces staring from it are. They bear forenames only. They’d all be in their late tens at least, by now. Each will have his or her own tale to tell, probably by now not even remembering drawing these pictures. Thus it strikes me that this towel is a discarded piece of another person’s history, now completely devoid of the meaning it once had; a souvenir of childhood, of parenthood, of classmates, of friendships, now used as no more than a tool for wiping up dribble.