One Sunday morning, at some point in 1986(ish), I was rooting around the endless tat in Brick Lane market. We’d swerve the National Front stalls, delight in the smells of cooking from the restaurants, avoid the pickpockets and men in bloodied butcher garb hawking black bin mags of ‘meat’ – am I saying £20 a bag a meat? No! Am I saying £15 a bag a meat? No! Am I saying £10 a bag a meat? No – £5 a bag of meat!! Just £5 for a huge bag of meat!!
Wandering about with my friend David ( Sophy Burleigh .. I suspect he won’t remember this highlight of one Sunday decades ago) I was looking for another shoe to go with a good one (a black plimsoll) I’d just found in a pile of rubbish.. it’d be somewhere.. and fuck me, I found it. We (I) had very little (no) money – I’d drunk it all.
I was amazed to see David interested in an object that I considered to be entirely irrelevant to our grimy lives – a thingy for keeping cutlery tidy. And, FFS, he bought it, he spent 50p on a used, orange, cutlery drawer thingy.. that was more than the price of a half pint of beer. The sort of thing that’d be 50p in a charity shop now.
Seriously.. at 22/3yo David was a couple of years older than me and, quietly, I thought he was cool.. but 50p for that thing, I wondered what had become of him.
But hey, nearly 40 years on I’ve just given it a wash cos it’s still keeping my cutlery tidy.
Phil Pool - Art and Protest 