A tenner for your thoughts

I was walking along through a shopping arcade today, inbetween work appointments and (hence) much that is annoying me.

When I saw it.

a £10 note (overseas readers should use the currency converter for a sense of the true import of this).

Glinting in the sunlight, diffuse as it was through the overhead decorative windows: sepia-toned (I'm not sure if that was the note itself or the dreamlike state I found myself in upon spotting said item), inviting me to reach down and pick it up.

I did, and immediately felt guilty.

Being honest/stupid (delete as appropriate), I walked up to the person twenty feet ahead of me and asked if he'd dropped any money.

Thankfully he was as honest/stupid as me, and said no, he hadn't. So I am £10 richer.

I know it's not the most exciting thing to blog about, but it's the best thing that's happened to me all day.

So far, anyway...

Money doesn't grow on trees...

...it grows in them.

The non-loneliness of the short-distance cyclist: post script

Following my recent day of being randomly accosted by a number of people with varying degrees of bizarreness (in this post), today I happened to pass by the same gentleman mentioned in the first encounter of that particular escapade.

I'd been quite suspicious that his friendly greeting and jovial manner may have been a prelude to him asking for money: well today when I passed him (in a less than salubrious part of town, near where I work) he greeted me with just as much enthusiasm. I wouldn't have noticed him, sat as he was on a low wall near the pavement, nor would I have recognised his face: his actions gave him away though. Immediately I felt on the defensive once again - I wonder whether he greets everyone like that, or thinks he knows me - but he then proceeded to make a few comments about the weather.

I responded in kind - yep, fingers crossed it stays like this and so on, the sort of conversation you'd have while queueing in a shop - and that was it. A short wave, and onwards.

So he wasn't, it appears, after money. Whatever the reasons for his seemingly pathologically cheery disposition, it's nice to be proved wrong.