Flotsam and Jetsam

I'm just about to nip down to Marks and Spencer to exchange some knickers (I know:  story of my life), but for some reason I am moved to write.  It's been cloudy and overcast here, and also quite chilly, and perhaps this weather has made me inclined to post more than usual:  it's the sort of weather in which you want to cuddle up with someone and chat aimlessly, so I'm doing that with and to my computer screen.

For some reason over the past couple of days I've been remembering something utterly random and passing someone told me about a year ago.  We were talking about some movie we'd both seen long ago, and they told me they'd seen it on TV, when drunk, after coming home from a night out.  Because they hadn't been of driving age all those years ago, I was curious as to how they'd got in to the city and then home (not of an age to drive:  picked up by an older friend? Took the bus?  Took the train? It was a pointless question, but not all questions we ask are important, right?).  They took the train. Now, where this person lived at the time you had to take the train over a suspension bridge over the sea to get in to or out from a night out.  And even though the information about coming home on the train was the least interesting part of the story, that image has stuck with me for almost a year, now: a single person, late at night, travelling on the train as it passes over the bridge over the sea.  I suppose it's the romance of the vision that appeals to me - the train cutting through the glittering dark silence, with the people wrapped inside its own lit interior - but I don't think just romance would make such a strong impression.  Perhaps it was also that I was provided with a glimpse of the way the person was before I knew them, which I always feel is somehow giving me access to a secret. Ah, well, who knows?

Funnily, though, today remembering that image made me also remember a shirt owned by the same person.  It was a very nice shirt.  I only saw them wear it once, but I guess sometimes it only takes one showing for you to like something.  It was a black shirt with stripes on it,

thinnish stripes in blue and green.  And, although I didn't notice until later, black and blue and green were also the colours that made up this person's eye colour.  I don't know whether subconsciously that's why I liked it, or whether I liked it without noticing that, and then when I noticed the eye colour later I had a "Hey!" moment, but in any case now when I remember that shirt I remember that it was all the colours of the person's eyes, as if those colours had been tidied away from each other and laid out in smooth stripes on a flat surface (the background turning into a stripe when the other strands were placed on top of it):  as if the person's eyes were pouring themselves down their torso.  I liked that shirt, anyway, but to like it more because it seems to extract something of the person's physicality into itself...there ought to be a figure of speech for that.

Funny.