My New Tie I

I had a hangover the morning of September the tenth 2001, and was walking home from some errand or other down Wentworth Street. My Strype Street flat, with its lovely courtyard, was just around the corner. At the weekend, when the market was in full swing, I used to be awoken by the shouts (and the three Peruvian buskers) but on that day, a Monday, it was empty and there were only a few stalls set up.

Petticoat Lane Market may have been amazing in the Nineteenth Century but the modern version is not so good, it is like a big pound shop, and I never felt like buying a thing from there since, and until, this Monday that I am describing. I was hurrying home through the drizzle, my head down, and in the corner of my eye I noticed a stall on which there was a mountain of neck ties. Perhaps it caught my eye because it was so typical of crappy Petticoat Lane Market. An old, beaten up wood and steel stall with an unarranged heap of ugly ties on it, just piled up there like rubbish. But one tie (and they all had different patterns and designs) stood out, asking me to buy it, so I did.

It was a black silk tie with a slice of the New York skyline etched in silver thread right in the middle of it, the Twin Towers being the most prominent part of the composition. It was a tie with a picture of the World Trade Centre on it.

And the next day the towers fall down. I was sitting at home programming some dull game for the internet and was half listening to the radio. For hours I thought it was a fictitious drama.

Isn't that peculiar, buying a tie, unexpectedly and for no reason and of all the hundreds of designs? What a coincidence!