The Bottle Carrier Unravels

Yesterday The Owner was hard at work all day, doing his Photoshop best for one of his hoomun mates at the pub (I like pubs, have I mentioned that recently?). Payment was to be two bottles of his finest wine. Now unlike The Owner, Pub Hoomun Mate does actually buy fine wines so The Owner worked like a little dervish to get the work done. Mid afternoon Pub Hoomun Mate arrived outside the studio door but wouldn't get out of his car as it was raining hard. The Owner, however, was not about to let a tropical monsoon get in the way of two bottles of fine wine so went rushing out and came back in clutching a rather nondescript box which to my reckoning might have been a bit heavy for just the two bottles. Oh how right was I? This is going to end in tears, mark my words. Inside it were not two, but six bottles of assorted fine wines. The Owner was salivating at the thought of such wines in his wine rack and I suspect that after drinking the first one, his intention was to keep refilling it with cheap plonk to decant and serve to his guests for sometime to come. I took the trouble of looking up the origins of wine and let me just share my findings with you... "The English word 'wine' comes from the Proto-Germanic winam, an early borrowing from the Latin vinum, 'wine' or '(grape) vine', itself derived from the Proto-Indo-European stem win-o." I think that last bit says it all somehow. Himself, having established that the quality of these wines, but particularly the price, was worthy of more public display than carrying them home in a rather nondescript cardboard box, decided that folks may see more of what he was carrying on his journey home, if he put them all in a Sainsbugs cardboard wine carrier for the journey. Well the journey home was a very wet affair with the tropical monsoon really getting into the swing of things, and, well, let me put it this way. What is the end result of carrying six heavy wine bottles loaded into a wine carrier made with cheap recycled cardboard when it is the monsoon season? Well, let me just say that his mood was a little sombre yesterday evening... and sober!