Friday, January the 15th, 2016

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Gloveboxes Of The Rich And Famous

I thought it would be interesting to run a series examining the contents of the gloveboxes of the rich and famous. That's right, I had finally taken leave of my senses. What was I thinking? For one thing, I have minimal interest in the rich and famous. Second, the glovebox is part of a car, and I know nothing about cars. Like Pablo Picasso and Derren Brown, I have never learned to drive.

It could be argued that the contents of a glovebox have nothing to do with the car per se, and that there may be intrinsic interest in the jumble of knickknackery to be found in the average glovebox. But if that is so, then the contents of the gloveboxes of the indigent and wretched are likely to hold as much interest as those of the rich and famous. Though of course the degrees of indigence and wretchedness are pertinent. The greater they are the less likely the subject would be to own a car, and therefore a glovebox.

Could the word “glovebox” be applied to any box in which gloves are kept? In my world, you're damn right it could! I am thinking, for example, of a cardboard shoebox from Freeman, Hardy, and Willis, which, when new, contained a pair of shoes, or even galoshes, but which has long since been reimagined as a handy box in which to store a selection of gloves, particularly discarded single gloves where the matching glove has been lost.

You might wonder why such gloves, of use only to amputees, have not simply been thrown away, into a bin or down a waste chute. You might wonder, but I don't. I can discern the beauty in a cardboard box crammed with old and abandoned gloves. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is going to waste shoved out of sight in a cupboard under the stairs. Better by far to take the lid off, exposing the gloves, and paste a little sticker on the side bearing the legend “Whither Capitalism?”, and sell it for a small fortune to a contemporary art gallery so contemporary art wankers can claim it is an “interrogation” of something or other. When you have counted up your cash payment from the gallery and stuffed it into your pocket, you can punch the nearest art wanker in the throat, which is a valuable, if violent, use of anybody's time.