Glove Actually

Gloves. I'm sure it's been done before, a thousand times over, but I'm thinking of starting a winter photographic project that involves the taking of pictures of all the single gloves I find discarded out on the street. I see so many on my walks in winter. Gloves and mittens of all colours, designs and sizes, and in various states of decay. A glover's wabi sabi. Ah, look, even a very cursory check of Google uncovers http://www.lostglove.co.uk/index.php

Anyway, it doesn't matter that it's been done before. Yes, there is something that moves me each time I discover a lost glove. You see, that glove has an owner and a twin. It is a token of their presence at a particular place, on a particular moment, revealed to me.

Of course, this dropped glove is technically litter, I suppose. Should the dropping of a Mars Bar wrapper be any less significant, then? The dropping of a glove, though, is accidental and its significance is therefore its loss to somebody. It is also personal to the owner, the two once going together literally 'hand in glove'. I like to think, therefore, that the sign of a lost glove moves me because (unlike the mass produced chocolate bar wrappers), the glove is a powerful signifier of the presence of an individual. One for whom we can even construct something of a basic biography.

For example, a pink, adult-sized glove probably signifies a woman. A woman who is right now rueing the inconvenient loss of an item of clothing. Her left hand is cold. Probably. I know that much. In fact, I hold the key to resolving her grief as well. If only we two lost souls, like the separated gloves themselves, could actually unite. We might even unknowingly pass each other every day on our routes to work. But I know that the possibility of us actually meeting, identifying each other as mutual glove keepers and then uniting our clothing items, is virtually nil. We'll probably remain to each other just two more random individuals in a faceless housing estate in a characterless city.

Might still do that photo project, though.