Travel Snacks

Today I saw a very large child on a very small bike. He was both large in the sense of being too tall for the bike, but also a little bit too wide. As he was riding along he was trying to eat M&Ms by pouring them one-handed into his mouth while steering with the other hand. This worked well until he came to the curb, but instead of stopping he just ploughed on over it, spilling M&Ms in every direction as he went. This reminded me of two instances that I recall fondly from my childhood.

The first was a cinema experience I had when I was about 12. Having stopped at the shops to purchase sweets, including M&Ms, on the way to the cinema, we arrived late to the showing and had to enter the auditorium in the dark. One of our number had nipped to the loo and said he would find us, so obviously we all ducked down so that he could not see us. In this awkward contorted position my sister elected to open a large bag of M&Ms, but lacked the necessary strength and leverage to do so easily. Applying more might than sense to the process resulted in the bag flying open and an explosion of M&Ms into the air. As they hit the floor, they sounded like a thousand raindrops on a corrugated iron roof, and the noise grew into a crescendo as they hit the slope and started rolling towards the front in unison. This went on for a surprisingly long time, during which several people sitting nearby began to pick stray M&Ms from their hair and clothing, and mutter with disgust at the rowdy teenagers causing mischief. Our friend had arrived in the dark just in time to witness the chocolate fountain and had known instantly where we were.   

The second recollection was from a younger age. I used to cycle over to a street where a few mates lived, and we would play games in the street or in someone’s house. On this particular day we wanted to play monopoly at someone’s house, but the game was at someone else’s house at the other end of the road. Being lazy teenagers, we cycled up the road to get it, but having procured the game we faced the difficult decision of how to get it back down the street with all of us on bikes. I offered to lay it across my arms as I cycled, which solved the problem for about 30 seconds. As I picked up speed, the current of air passing over me lifted the lid of the game up into my face. Temporarily blinded by the cardboard box, but still travelling forward, I swayed merrily from side to side, during which time I was faintly aware of a stream of monopoly money flying out to either side of me. Finally I crashed into a wall, spilling the remaining contents into the road. Obviously we all found this hilarious, but we spent longer picking cash out of people’s front gardens than we did playing the game.

Rarely has a rotund teenager caused me such nostalgia.