Igor Clark

I remember having, as a young child, a red t-shirt with the Coca-cola logo emblazoned upon it in Arabic. I don’t know where I got this t-shirt; maybe an equally small visiting friend left it at our house and I “inherited” it, as there’s no way my Dad would have sanctioned its purchase, unless he really didn’t clock what it was. At any rate it feels like his very lack of realisation was part of the shirt’s attraction to me, making it somehow more mine than all the other oh-so-explicable stuff surrounding us. I loved it, anyway. It’s quite an early memory: I remember wearing it on a warm day in the main hall at my infants’ school, and we moved our house (and hence my school) in December 1978, so at the latest it would have been towards the end of the summer in that year, making me six years old. Thirty years ago. It feels like it could have been earlier, but of course recollections of childhood can be deceptive. I reckon it must be close to every time I’ve seen a tin of Coke with its writing in a language other than English since then that I’ve thought of that t-shirt, or at least my memories associated with it. It's a well-worn mental path for me now, meaning sights like this can evoke easily the excited sensations provoked in an inquisitive child by the possibility of some arcane knowledge to which he and he alone might be privy.