Welcome wanderer

I was the sort of child that got upset because no one ate the Shreddies. We ignored them until they went stale and had to be thrown out, clearly defeated by the golden appeal of Cornflakes. As an adult I am still visited by such pointless episodes of melancholia, triggered by small, seemingly innocuous events. Proust too, could be struck by similar attacks; but I’m not claiming a special similarity with his talent.

Yesterday I asked my partner to carry a bag out to the rubbish bins. There are quite a lot of bags being carried out from my flat to the rubbish bins at the moment as I am in the middle of a major clear out, the sort which only takes place in anticipation of moving house or a significant birthday. Alongside a slow secretion of paperbacks into my local charity shop and old tax returns to my shredder, I am also getting strict about the sorts of objects that E F Benson would have called bibilos. So thhat particular rubbish bag contained an assortment of oddities that would not have been possible either to sell or to give away, and ought not to have been riffled through. They were personal trinkets of no interest or value to anyone else.

“You can’t throw out a teddy bear!” he said fishing around in the bag with genuine amazement, “Look, poor teddy is sad”. Clutching one paw from behind he made the bear wipe his eyes. “Poor teddy’s crying” he mocked, and then put it back in the bag. I got on with unlocking the door and struggling with the other two bags that I was carrying. Two flights of stairs and two deadlocks later we were standing on the front path, blinking in the morning sunshine. I lifted the lid on the dustbin and threw in my sacks. Roger faltered. He produced the teddy from behind his back where it had been hidden in his other hand. “I’m going to leave him here” he announced and propped the ted up on the green recycling bin by the gate. The bear seemed to blink in the bright sunshine too then watched us walk to the corner of the street in silence and kiss goodbye. He teased me again. “Don’t be silly” I pretended to be serious, “it’s just a stuffed toy”.

However much I tried to ignore it, a shadow had been cast over the morning, a strange and faintly ridiculous guilt was gently wafting around, and the faster I cycled towards work the more I thought about teddy. This was after all not a valuable bear, not bespoke, not particularly well tailored and certainly mass produced. From a supermarket I think, the remnant of a once-important friendship, a silly gift from a lover long-gone. I don’t even think he arrived alone, I seem to remember he came boxed with something else; chocolate perhaps, or a mug not deemed sufficient by himself. Gift wrapped. If you look carefully it says 2005 on his right foot; six years old. Time flies!

But by lunchtime I had largely forgotten about him and as Roger and I exchanged text messages about several other things I thought how the episode had officially passed. Cycling home some nine hours later nothing was further from my mind, so it came as a small shock to see teddy still sitting proudly on his green wheelie bin waiting for me, untouched, affability permanently stitched onto his face. Had he really been there all day? It seems silly but I felt a tightening of my throat as if suppressing a tear.

What was it like teddy, sitting on that bin? Were you embarrassed to be so publicly rejected, would you have preferred it if we had just dropped you in with the garbage as originally intended and ended it all with a stiff upper lip?

I wonder who saw my bear, and what they thought of his public humiliation? Maybe some of the passersby assumed he had been dropped by a child and left on my bin by a member of David Cameron’s Big Society hoping to affect a reunion. I suspect a few passing toddlers would have reached out for him only to have their hand slapped away by a careworn parent. “You don’t know where he’s been”. It’s possible, of course, that passing schoolchildren might had played football with him, but unlikely since he was returned to his original spot and still looked quite clean. No, what happened to teddy was more-or-less nothing. His eerie offered him a view of the old grammar school opposite with all its comings and goings, and the builders renovating number nine. And maybe my neighbours also on their way to work, each throwing a wry smile in his direction as they passed. What is certain though is that everyone who noticed him felt some of my guilt at his abandonment.

My furry friend had made it through a whole day homeless out on the streets of London, there was no way I could leave him out for the night now so I picked him up and took him inside to put in the washing machine. This was to to be a new lease of life for one small and insignificant bear, a bear of whom I feel ridiculously proud.