Ian McMillan: Fruitless fantasies about the poshest of empty tins

So here’s what happened. I was nearing the end of my morning stroll, coming up Barnsley Road and about to turn down Bly Road. It was just getting light and a bus full of sleepy workers was rumbling by. A dog walker walked past on the other side of the road walking a walking dog. I saw something gleaming on a wall; at first I thought it was a valuable artefact, some silver loot ditched by a robber, but as I got closer I discovered that it was in fact an empty tin of pineapples, the sort that sophisticated people in detached houses put on their gammon. Rings, in other words, not chunks.

I stood and stared at the tin for perhaps a little too long, but I was intrigued. The writer in me started to form stories around it, the poet in me wanted to make images from it. You sometimes see empty beer cans on walls, and you can understand that: a late-night reveller has glugged the last drops and places the can on what he thinks is a shelf in his house. You sometimes see a can of pop, and you can understand that: a kid has waited for ages for his first date to turn up and when she doesn’t appear he puts his tin on the wall with exaggerated care. I’m not condoning the placing of tins on walls, of course, I’m just exploring the tales behind the littering. I walked home with my head full, not for the first time, of pineapples.

So, what’s the story here? Maybe it could have been a cosy dinner-date in a bloke’s house. Maybe he’d tried to be daring, and when he’s got the gammon out he’s laid the pineapple rings across it like the Olympic symbol and she’s looked at him and said, in a voice like a squeaky door: “I allus prefer fried egg on me gammon” and romance didn’t bloom and he chucked the empty tin away in disgust and it ended up on the wall.

Maybe it was a rare pineapple tin: I have to admit I didn’t check. People collect the oddest things, like those labels you get on bananas, and till receipts, so perhaps there could be a Society of Pineapple Tin Collectors and this was an almost unique 1938 Mason tin from the short-lived Mason’s Pineapple Farm in Pontefract. Perhaps it had been thrown away by mistake and there was a gold mine sitting innocently on that wall. A gold mine in pineapple tin terms, of course, not a real gold mine.

Maybe a very strong magpie had nicked it from an open bin, intrigued by its gleaming, but then had to drop it because it was a bit too heavy.

Maybe it’s a piece of conceptual art called Enigma 6: Can on Wall.

Maybe it’s half of a child’s home-
made walkie-talkie and somewhere there’s a bit of string and an 
empty tin of beans. Maybe they didn’t wash the tin out properly and they got pineapple juice down their neck. Pardon? Why can’t it just be an empty tin? Ah, that’s far too simple!