Said it all

Right, so what does THIS mean? A single white plastic bag thrust unfolded through the message pipes of the station. Send for Robert Langdon, we need to decipher this.

The white plastic bag is like a ghostly remnant of the original colourful semaphore collection of sweet wrappers. The most likely meaning is that some lazy sod could not be bothered to walk the ten yards to the station rubbish bin, but at least they were contentious enough to stash the bag rather than toss it to the breeze. Indeed, with stores charging people for carrier bags, there has been a reduction in the amount of plastic bag litter. Plastic bags used to be a regular a feature of the hedgerow as birdsong. While an appeal to the public’s environmental sensibilities didn’t halt the spread of plastic across the countryside, charging folk a penny a bag has caused outrage, the re-use of plastic bags and a whole new ‘bag for life’ industry. I own several bags for life, not because I believe in reincarnation but because I repeatedly forget to take my bag to the shops and have to pick up a new one.

So possibly what this is is just a handy way of always having a plastic bag to hand. By stashing plastic bags at various strategic locations throughout the village, one would never be far from a plastic bag if needed, and would not, presumably, have a cupboard full of bags for life.

Say no more

They’re gone!

Is it a conscientious cleaner? Or is it a message. If so, what kind of message, a warning perhaps that this platform is no longer a safe place to trade cryptic confection communications?

Certainly some spook shuffling around in a wide brim hat and raincoat with the collar turned up, or a bummer, is a more likely bet than at railway employee with a rubbish bag and a spare half hour to beautify the station.

Or maybe I do the platform staff a disservice. The village station stop is by no means an inner city hub, where the litter consists mainly of sleeping tourists and tramps, so the errant crisp packet dancing in the breeze does rather stick out. I’m prepared to bet that the staff would leave the wrappers there as a temporary art installation until professional pride overcame art appreciation and they trashed the lot. At least they didn’t simply rearrange the lot to confuse the intended recipient.

I shall miss the colourful collection of wrappers. Not to the extent that I would want to add to them though, I am much more a folded fag packet sort of chap but I thought that in an age of communication saturation, where everyone is constantly communicating yet not really saying anything that it was interesting to see something that was public yet coded, highly visible yet narrowly understandable, and more letter than litter.

Say it one last time

The flight jacket. Timeless. Classic. I remember when I got my flight jacket. A birthday present, it was everything that was great about a garment, it had sheepskin lining to keep you toasty, and a leather exterior to show I have a grudge against cows. I still have it, even though it has been unworn for twenty years, after an evening where I was thoughtless enough to wear it while also wearing chinos and was greeted with the phrase ‘alright flight commander?’ when I strolled into my local pub.

Two things – at least it wasn’t a ‘Top Gun’ reference but…it’s WING COMMANDER you arsehole!

My plan is to wear it in my old age. I am preparing the mission patches that I will have sewn onto it. I am tempted to get some made up along the lines of ‘Iraq’, ‘Lybia’, ‘Syria’, China’, Syria again!’ and of course ‘Syria…can we bomb it any flatter?’ but there’s also the temptation to have mission patches along the lines of ‘Narnia’ or ‘Mordor’.

The moment, and I mean the moment, I walked out of the shop with my new jacket, I started noticing all the other f**kers with their sheepskin flight jackets. Where the hell had they come from? There had, surely, not been this number of fighter-pilot wannabes when I was walking into the shop.

Once you purchase something, you start to notice others with the same or similar product. Once you start to do something, you start to notice that others do it too. This aspect of human behaviour explains the success of social networking on the internet. And dogging.

Most of us are too busy putting in a dazzling performance in the lead role of the production that is our lives to sit back and scrutinise the background. Once you do though, it’s like the Matrix, you start to notice weird shit popping up everywhere. Actually, it’s totally mundane shit but because you’ve noticed it and because you are playing the lead role in the movie of your life it has to be significant right?

I have, of late, been fixating on chocolate bar wrappers jammed behind a pipe on the train station I commute from. By focusing on this I can distract myself from what others describe as ‘real life’ but what I consider to be ‘a series of situations, problems and experiences so complex and horrible that I feel they can only be solved using an magic abacus made of beer’.

The point is, once you start to notice something, you can’t stop. Take for instance the chocolate wrappers. It’s fairly unlikely that they are actually some sort of message (unless it’s ‘this is the shittest Dan Brown plot ever’) and they are more likely to be a lazy, but tidy, kid placing the wrappers there every morning when he has his 3,500 calorie breakfast shortly before he presents his hyperactive arse at school to be educated.

So, on the train, I notice that there’s a carefully folded wrapper jammed between the table and the carriage ‘wall’. Normally I’d just think litter lout but, lucky me, because I have fixated on the secret society of public transport confectionary communicators, I am now panicking that by sitting next to a folded choccie bar wrapper I am somehow sending a message. I have no problem sending a message, I’d just like to know what it is.

For instance…

Mars Bar - unimaganitive
Chrunchie – your mouth will feel dirty afterwards
Dairy Milk – Oh God, so good, I want more, more, more. Feeling a bit sick now. More!
Marathon – problems accepting change
Curlywurly – eight inches of pure pleasure…but didn’t they used to be longer?
Frit and nut – satisfaction and it’s one of your five
Finger of fudge – too delicious to be used as a sex aid…twice.

Say what?

I am, for the moment at least, currently commuting from a sleepy to the point of narcolepsy station that somehow escaped the Great Beeching Butchery, possibly because of it's very insignificance or possibly because he once has a bunk up in the Gents and formed a ramrod attachment to the place. The station could not be much smaller or simpler unless it was mounted on a board in an attic somewhere with OO scale trains running through it.

It does, however, retain a certain charm and the ability to spring a few surprises if you look carefully. Standing waiting for my train I noticed this collection of chocolate bar wrappers neatly folded and lodged behind a pipe on the platform. My first reaction was that it was a very neat litter lout, or a person too lazy to walk to the bin but with an obsessive compulsive disorder. (Why is it called an obsessive compulsive disorder, surely the condition of somebody who is compelled to have everything arranged just so or is a neatness freak should be an obsessive compulsive order?).

Or even a bored schoolboy.

Other explanations suggest themselves. The first is that it is as sort of message, either simply conveyed through folding the reports strategically to spell out a word on the vertical - this is a great idea but not secure and also limits you to the alphabet available at the confection counter. More probable is that the colours used are some of code, like signal flags.

As to what the message might be about, while international espionage or the doings of a secret order of the Knights Templar are possibilities, more likely is that it is a coded message used by the sort of gentlemen who wish to arrange clandestine meetings in railway stations ('Beechers’) and find simply recording the time and date of their next visit on the back of the loo door too risky, and that arranging assignations through txt, twitter or Facebook lacks romance.

Most likely it is a board schoolboy, but you just know that what started as an absent minded action has now developed into a challenge - how many wrappers can he lodge before they are removed or, worse, replaced in a different order?