Jarduous – 109

I’m gonna go get this one, I said, fishing in my bag for my official Jar Hunter hat.

“Oh yeah? Where is it?”

“Well, I don’t know, but look, it’s harbourside, right? That’s just, like, these few buildings around us.”

“Yeah, and the other side of the river, and up toward Hotwells and around Bedminister.”

“No, it’s- look, it’s got that red brick. It’s that weird car park down the road with the funky railings, gotta be.”

“That… where?”

“It’s just over there”, I insist, waving my arm vaguely in the direction of a confused colleague. “Weird railings. I saw a guy in there humming really loudly one time”, I offer, falteringly. “If that, uh, narrows it down at all”.

We exchange stares and I can feel the strength of his belief infusing me. Forget the army, forget football, if you want to see real camaraderie, look at front-line web developers. It works, too. Team spirit is a powerful thing. The sheer force of a colleague’s faith in my quest quickens my step, lengthens my stride. It almost feels like the lift arrives quicker than usual. I don’t know if the jars have ever contained anything but art, but if they have, whatever it is, when I break out onto hard concrete and breathe deeply of this bountiful world, I could swear I could smell it. This’ll be an easy one.

The other great thing about teams is division of culpability. When one person fails, the team fails. When one person spends an hour walking the entire length of a harbour, twice, well, that’s too much incompetence for any individual to shoulder alone. To my colleague’s misfortune, responsibility’s almost infinitely divisible. Too bad for him, jars aren’t.

Jar number: 109
Date found: 28th April, 2011, 13:44
Location: Outside SS Great Britain, Harbourside

Jarmergency! – 83

Original submission here.

When I first see a jar on the site, it’s an entirely hypothetical construct. Intellectually I know it’s out there, sitting unguarded on some wall, vulnerable to any passer-by, but in my heart, until I know where it is, it doesn’t exist. That’s when the game changes. A jar might’ve been sitting in place for weeks, but that tiny window of active pursuit is the only time it can really be taken from me. It’s an intensely paranoid experience. If I see someone walking the same street as me, a few paces ahead, I start to wonder at their motives. Do they know? Are they trying to beat me there? Every time we reach a crossroads and they don’t veer away, I get more suspicious. Surely they know I’m right here. Are they taunting me?

I arrived at #83’s hiding place to be confronted with my worst nightmare: Another person walking in its direction, a slight distance ahead of me, destined to get there first. Disaster! To be pipped at the post by some lousy, curious, innocent pillar of the community. I quickened my pace in a futile effort to overtake them and brainstormed contingency plans for if the worst should happen. In some dark recess of my brain, sulking from neglect, my rational mind might’ve observed how acutely unlikely it’d be for another jar hunter to arrive seconds before I did, but if so, its sullen commentary was lost in the deafening roar of blood rushing in my ears. As my newfound nemesis and I converged on that fated nook I finalised my strategy and steeled myself for a showdown.

OH, I- YOU- I SEE YOU FOUND MY JAR!, I would casually interject. I WONDERED WHERE THAT’D GOTTEN TO.

Flustered bewilderment meets wild-eyed determination.

BAD JAR.

But, oh. Huh. She just ambled straight past. Right, yeah, okay, that’s her dog over there. Come to think of it, she wasn’t even going all that close. She doesn’t even look like she’s especially into jars. False alarm, I guess.

This time.

Rejarvenation – 78, 79, 81

Original submission here.

Hey Mark, they all say. When’re you gonna get more jars? It’s been weeks now. Their eyes brim at a disappointment barely restrained, their voices wavering despite forced bravado. I bat them away. Jar hunting’s a young man’s game. Leave it to the Rorys and Rebeccas of the world; let the new generation take up the mantle. I had a good run! Sixteen jars. Nobody’s going to top that. A third of all of them, most of the time, and that’s not including all the ones I narrowly missed. That’s good enough for anyone.

Still the voices echo in my ears. The disappointment of my peers stings bitterly in the corners of my eyes.

I’ll just take the direct route home. I’ll save a lot of time without all that random meandering. Maybe take some photos, write some haikus. People’ll understand. They’ll find some other cause to rally around. I always said I’d aim for between 20-30% of the jars, and I’ll fall out of that range in a couple of days. That’ll mark my retirement, I think.

Random debris glints in the periphery of my vision. A milk bottle, a drinks can. In the recycling bin, a Dolmio fluted 403ml. I ignore it and hurry home.

Still, there’s no reason I can’t still follow the project! Maybe I’ll have a quick look on the website, just for old time’s sake. Nostalgia’s healthy, they say. I’ll just read the first few posts. Even if I’m retired, it’s still fun to see all th-

My breath catches in my throat.

I know where that is.

That’s on my way to work.

I stare in silence. I can hear my heart beating. For a moment my rational mind protests, resists, strains against a welling momentum, then finally snaps like an overwound bowstring. I launch from my home as if from a ballista, full of momentum, the air parting before me as though timid, scurrying quietly back in my wake. I’m not a man anymore, not a fragile frame of bone and flesh but a striding force of pure purpose. The rain on my chest is a baptism. I’m born again.

Conjaration – 48

Original submission here.

#48 was largely an accident, and a fantastically serendipitous one at that.

I’d spent most of the day wandering around as part of a Flickr meet, playing tour guide across all the secret streets of Clifton I’d recently become acquainted with. The group were heading up to the suspension bridge to snatch some photographs from the fading sunlight as I was trying to explain the appeal of this jar-hunting hobby of mine, and I was mid-sentence in some loquacious spiel about the excitement of hidden treasures when we passed a familiar-looking bench. I felt like a magician snatching a coin from behind someone’s ear when I reached down and plucked out this latest addition to my collection. Many thanks, Kirsty, for making a wizard of me. It couldn’t have gone any better if I’d staged it, as I’m sure at least one person believed I had.

A Jarring Confession – 1, 7, 10, 11

This email was sent to Kirsty at the start of my jar hunting quest. It was originally published here, where you can also find Kirsty’s reply.

Hi Kirsty. You might remember me as the fellow who reported finding jar number seven a week ago. I wanted to thank you, firstly, for setting up such a charming project! It reminds me, in a roundabout way, of the computer games I played in my childhood. My siblings and I would sit huddled around a small, flickering television for hours at a time, confronting imaginary challenges of every persuasion, but our favourites were always adventure games. The details varied wildly; sometimes we faced medieval legions, sometimes futuristic armadas, perhaps the undead, the eldritch or the alien, but one of the most enduring staples was that in each game, in each fantastical world, there would be a discrete set of items hidden about, waiting to be found, usually having no intrinsic significance beyond their basic scarcity, each one taunting the player from some obscure nook or cranny. And inevitably, possessed by deep-seated compulsions we could no more understand than resist, when faced with these finite colourful abstractions, we sought them.

It’s in that vein that I email you, with a guilty conscience.

I have four of the jars. My original one – number seven – plus numbers one, ten and eleven. It’s sort of become an odd hobby for me, a talking point with the people I know and an excuse to get to know my town better. I take aimless, meandering routes to and from the office to let me explore more ground, and at work I enlist the knowledge of my enthusiastic workmates to try and deduce, from the photographs, where each jar might be. They’re all proudly displayed on my desk at the moment, and we celebrate each time a new one is added, argue about who was closest and joke about starting jar-finding competitions.

I’m confessing all of this because I realise it’s not the original intent of the project, and I want to apologise for having subverted it. I’m entirely in love with my little beautiful jars, but I’m happy to put them back for others to find, if you prefer. I don’t want to deprive anyone else of the enjoyment I and my colleagues have found in your work. I’d still quite like to hunt them, still take them, if only temporarily, so I can register them for my own melodramatic sense of accomplishment, but the last thing I want is to tread over your efforts by whisking away each jar the moment you place it. I hope there’s some way I can participate without compromising the project, but if you want me to back off entirely then, of course, I’ll respect that.