This is on the edge of things that you hunt for, rather than things you encounter. But it’s an easy one – the city is littered with bus tickets, one way or another.
This time, I find the ticket on the seat of the bus next to me. I feel a bit furtive. I don’t know if it belongs to the person a bit to my left. But I also see it’s a single, so I know they can’t use it again.
I take it. In the way that I took bus tickets when I was abroad. And menus. And paper napkins with the trusty environmental mark on them.
When is it hoarding, and when is it collecting? When you are abroad for the first time
(at least, the first you properly remember), the world jumps out at you: the one you saw in textbooks. It’s really there.
And the tickets show a different currency. And the menus are in another language, just like the books promised. And the paper napkins are recycled stock, underscoring all those environmental values you now see in practice.
All you need is distance. Distance gives you a little more exclusivity. And time gives you even more. Suddenly those items, really just daily objects, discarded ones often, take on their own significance.
When I was six or so, my mum got me to keep a diary for the summer holiday. I wrote a sentence or two a day. We stuck in tickets for a few things, a theatre programme or two. Every now and then, I revisit it.
These days, the tickets aren’t really tickets any more. They are an indication of how prices have inflated. They are a marker of print styles from thirty odd years ago.
And they are a physical reminder that, once, you stood in that place. You were on that little ferry, the one that charged you 60p for the privilege. You were in that theatre show, the one where brown swirls seemed a good way to go for the programmes.
We saw an episode of The Young Montalbano recently, where one character was determinedly keeping EVERYTHING in his life. Every bus ticket. Every top off a beer bottle. And so on.
I think this is quite hard to countenance, in some ways. We don’t always want to be ruled by the past as an inventory of our lives. While we can, we also like the notion of stepping forwards into the future, unfettered by all those bus tickets and bottle tops and empty cereal packets.
That bus ticket I picked up. It’s still in my pocket. I’m less sure about keeping it, really – there are many more to replace it, if I need. And I have a bus pass, too, so I know that it wasn’t my ticket, just one I picked up for the purpose of writing about it.
Let’s consider the blog post a way to remember it. That should do fine.