Week 140, Danger of death

"Do you know anyone interested in this?"

A mystery person offering items found at the end of a rainbow.  A rainbow that distributes bounty on a semi-regular basis to this one person.

I say mystery person, a local wide-boy known to one and all, the only mystery was the conveyor belt of 'things'.  Always with the stray goods, the odd items, always found in "a derelict house."  Of course they were, that's right, there's millions of derelict houses with stuff lying around waiting to enter the marketplace.

A Penny Black on an envelope, a fondue set, a collection of first edition Beatrix Potter books, a laminated badgers foot, a solid silver cocaine spoon, a gold disc commemorating over 200000 sales of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards version of Amazing Grace, you name it, he'd had it.  On this occasion it was an Eventide 2016 rack-mount digital reverb unit, brand new in 1983 and probably less than a year old at the time.*

I guess I was being asked if I knew anyone because I played the guitar.  Surely it wasn't being offered to me - I had a guitar bought off a mate for a tenner which was worth at least 8 quid less than I paid for, and played through an amplifier made out of a broken cassette deck I'd retrieved from a bin.  I wasn't in the market for anything that cost more than a loaf of bread or that wasn't edible.

I passed, but I guess someone, somewhere, stumped up the 25 quid he was after for the bit of professional kit worth a factor of a hundred more than all my other gear put together.

It must be a risky business going in all those derelict houses, or that one bountiful derelict house, as he ended up dead at an early age.  That's the sort of clunky cause and effect explanation that was offered to me in a pub, "Did you know x is dead?  He had a brain tumour, it must have been all those drugs."  I'd say it was just one of those things, there's always the danger of death, it had nothing to do with the derelict houses, or the consumption of a rainbow array of drugs which consisted of nothing more than a bit of hash and a few mushrooms.**  But who is interested in boring facts when you can populate and reinforce your belief with your prejudice.

* I have no idea what it was but this is the right era.
** Karma?  No, that suggests a punishment, it's random chance.  Plus that's a wooly belief system.

For official/internal use only:

7777

0-9