THE BALL

“There is a ball…” I said.

I looked outside through my kitchen window on one recent afternoon and there it was, just sitting there in the gutter at the edge of the cobbles, neglected, alone, unloved but, I imagined, probably not forgotten.

“Eh…?” came the reply drifting from out of the living room.

“There is a ball…” I repeated.

Then, liking the sound of the words, I repeated them a few more times until they probably got really annoying.

“There is a ball… There is a ball… There is a ball…”

Each time changing the emphasis, before I finally settled on a very precise “Mr Data” way of saying it which was the one that appealed to me the most.

God! I can be hard to live with…

There was no movement from within the living room, so I went off and grabbed my work teffalone, and, after a certain amount of fiddling and swearing, switched it to “camera” mode, went outside and took a picture of the ball, just so I could hold up the teffalone, show off the image and prove, once and for all that…

“There is a ball…”

Sadly, this process was not to work out as planned as a long-suffering figure finally emerged from the living room, headed towards the sink and attempted to see the ball for herself, before asking what I was up to, getting a reply and pronouncing me to be “weird”.

“But… There is a ball…” I replied, snapping the snapshot anyway, and holding up the image as proof and for further scrutiny, also earning maximum “Kudos Points” for correctly identifying the cartoon character on the ball as being one “Lightning McQueen” from the “Cars” films.

Unfortunately those self same “Kudos Points” were instantly deducted when I mentioned that the name “Lightning McQueen” was clearly printed upon the ball underneath the picture.

I could, of course, have claimed that I had remembered it anyway without the aid of the caption, but the damage to my “Kudos Points” accumulator was already done and, to be fair, that would have been a bear-faced, out-and-out lie.

I began to wonder, briefly, whether the tiny person to whom, I imagined, that this forgotten ball belonged was missing it terribly, and it made me think of all the other lost things that lead to life’s little heartbreaks when you’re that age, and how some of us never really get over them. Then I remembered a dart lost in the long grass on the playing field near to where I grew up and which is now lost itself, having been “developed” into a housing estate years ago, and then I wondered what the heck I was doing throwing darts around on a playing field anyway...?

The next morning, there was no ball.

“There is no ball…” was something that I wisely did not say.