Things happen on sunny days and one sunny day, as I was walking in West London, there it stood in the window of a bric-à-brac merchant, among the neglected and the forlorn, the second lease hopers in the life of the detritus of our world. Recleaned flower pots and reclaimed china, pulled perhaps from the darkest corner of the kitchen store, an old frame around a coronation picture of Her Majesty in 1953, little statuettes of nymph-like creatures or leprechauns, possibly, and little trinkets and plastic rejects in the shape of children's tricycles, watering cans that had seen the life and deaths of verbenas and lavender and old lillies of the valley. Dinner jackets and old apparels pulled out from the mothballs of yesteryear, and shirts gaily patterned perhaps from someone's past jaunts in tropical isles.
The bric-à-bracer, if he can be so-called, sat there among his wares.
I am using the appellation sparingly as he was no ordinary fellow that you saw in dusty shops under the sign board "William Watkins and by the Grace of God, his Twelve Children".
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