"Why Did I Buy It / Steal It, Keep It?"

[leigh kitchen]

We must all have things we come across every now and then that make us wonder why on earth we have them.
Recent "finds" amongst the detritus of my extravagant youthful expenditure, hadn't seen them for 40-odd years.

The bullet cigarette lighter, slightly longer than a 7.62 round, presumably so that you couldn't shove it in a SLR magazine by mistake.
The NAAFI shop in Ebrington Barracks, Londonderry sold them for £1 a time, I think it was, back around 1974.
I bought at least four, probably more like six of them due to losses.
I've never smoked, presumably I thought I'd win girls over by lighting their cigarettes with a fake bullet.

The grenade cigarette lighter picked up in Nicosia in 1978, I thought at the time that it was a ridiculously ugly piece of cheap kitsch tat and still bought it ("Kitchen" must be derived from "kitsch".
Presumably I'd realised that my fake bullet lighters weren't making any headway with the girls so I'd gone for a fag lighter that was hefty enough to befuddle their judgement if I threw it at them.