Bowens’ wife was surprised when he volunteered to take the laden bags to the charity shops. Usually, evenings, a tugboat couldn’t pull him out of his East Enders and Coronation Street engrossed armchair. He put two bags each in the foyers of the Air Ambulance and Tenovus, and two more in the dog charity lobby. The hated brown corduroy jacket was at the bottom of the last bag, under the Woody Allen dvds and Jean Paul Sartre books. Susan had bought it new a month back, and it had been disdain at first sight. It was the sort of quasi-academic garb she liked and he detested.

Most of her pals worked at the university, and their braying confidence made him feel inadequate, a block of mental concrete. The men were all togged in corduroy jackets and, for all he knew, some of the women too. Tomorrow he’d tell her it’d been stolen from the car, when he’d inadvertently left the window open. R.I.P. hated jacket.
As he drove off, drop done, a fellow in his fifties, rat eyes and as crafty as a lair of foxes, gathered up the six bags. Two days later half of their contents were on his ‘Animal Welfare Charity’ stall at the margin of the monthly Mumbles farmers’ market. No animal had ever benefited materially from his sales, but the foxy fellow himself copped a nifty ten pounds when a woman purchased the jacket. ‘Pristine,’ he said to her encouragingly. She heard ‘Christine’, and wondered at his familiarity.