Some years ago I heard a short story about gawkers at road accidents, those people who gather round at such events. Their purpose is to inhibit the approach of a doctor, hence the expression “let me through I’m a doctor”. If these people weren’t there the doctor would have unrestricted access to the injured party and no reason to call out and announce his or her status. Thus the gawkers have a function in enabling medical help to identify itself; that they may delay access is a small price to pay for the essential identification function.
None of this was in the short story, that concerned itself with an observation that all gawkers are in fact the same people, at all locations and all times. The suggestion was that there is a group of people who are forced to attend road accidents as a kind of curse (as opposed to paramedics, for whom it is a job). This was meant to sound rather sinister and mysterious in precisely the way my description has failed to convey.
What has this to do with yearbooks or indeed cardigans, which have gone three paragraphs without a mention? Well it is my contention that there was a cardigan wearer in all years at all schools and they can be tracked through yearbooks. Here in the UK obviously not, we don’t have yearbooks but we do have cardigans, there’s just no pictorial record of them at school. There was one in the year below me at my school and as far as I could tell at the time he thrust his cardigan at me in a provocative manner more than once; let’s hope he’s still wearing one.
Anyway, my illustration this week is a mock up of what might be lurking in yearbooks and in my case is lurking in my memory.
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