The Wall Where Lost Gloves Go

It began with one small red mitten, pushed onto a railing spike outside number 14 so that whoever had dropped it would see it at eye level rather than trodden into the pavement. That was several winters ago and nobody remembers who did it.

Now the whole run of railing does it. Gloves appear along the top overnight, one to a spike, palms out, in the manner of a very small and very patient audience. Woollen ones, a lost golf glove, a pair of enormous gardening gauntlets that stayed all of one February. In the good months there are three or four. In January there have been nineteen.

Nobody organises it. There is no sign, no group, no account anywhere. But somebody, clearly, walks that stretch and tidies: gloves get straightened, pairs get put together when their halves arrive a week apart, and anything that has been rained on for a fortnight quietly disappears. The tidying is as anonymous as the gloves.

What the street cannot agree on is how many are ever collected. The people at number 14 say almost none. The woman at the corner shop says she has watched three people take one back, and that all three looked around first to check that nobody was watching, as though claiming your own glove were a thing you might be judged for.