Found and lost
When I was a slip of a lad... about 10 years old or so... I was visiting my great grandparents during a long Summer holiday.

I decided to go hunting around their house for "artefacts"... you know, World War 1/2 guns, bullets and all of the other stuff that elderly people always have hidden in their homes.

Half an hour of snooping through draws revealed that my increadibly house proud oldies have cleared all of the interesting stuff away and all I could find that looked even slightly old was a rather nice soft brown leather wallet - no pun/paedo remark intented.

At this point, my great grandfather walked in an caught me in the act of disshonest appropriation with the intent of permenantly depriving the rightful owner.

Lovely old boy that he was, he told me that I could keep this wallet. I then spent the rest of the holiday trying to blag as much spare change from all of my grandparents, aunts, uncles and anyone else who would cough up some dosh for their darling grandson/nephew.

I even took up playing Newmarket - a gambling game - with my auntie to boost my cash levels. The curruption of youth eh?

Anyway, come the time for my father to collect me and drive me home two weeks later, I had the princely sum of £11 in my little brown wallet.

To a 10 year old in 1982 that was a shit-load of cash... FYI it was easily enough to purchase 9 original Star Wars figures or 9 gallons of petrol or 16 pints of beer or 70 bars of Cadburys chocolate... so you get the picture.... I was rich.

Dad and I stop at a motorway service station for a drink and a rest on the way home and I proudly take out my wallet to remove a crisp £1 note (for the junior B3TA readership, born after 1983, £1 notes are those funny little green pieces of paper that looked like Monopoly money) to pay for an extra-large chocolate bar and a fizzy drink (with plenty of sugar and E-numbers in it).

Upon returning to the car to finish the journey home, I open the little brown wallet to re-count my cash. And I make the horrifying discovery that somewhere between my acquiring gastric treats and getting back into the car, I had lost every pennt of my ill-gottten gains. Bugger.

The realisation sets in that at 15p per week pocket money, it was going to take nearly two years for me to replace it!

...now that kind of length is unimaginable to a 10 year old!
(IcePimp, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 14:08, Reply)