8536/21455
As far as good purchases go, this is a pretty good one.
At some time around the start of this millennium or maybe a few years before I went to Lilywhites at Piccadilly Circus to buy some tennis balls. A cursory search online suggests that that shop closed in 2002, so this was at least 24 years ago.
I bought three or four tubes of four tennis balls. They were Slazenger, Wimbledon Ultra Vis balls with Hydroguard, so none of your tat. The tube was supposed to be £9.99 (which was a lot of money in those days) but they were on sale at a 70% reduction and just £2.99 a tube (not even 75p a ball). I played a fair bit of tennis over the years and the balls held together OK. When I wasn't playing much tennis, the tubes went into a crate and that crate found it's way through all my house moves. I think when I started playing tennis again last year I was still using these balls.
They weren't great for tennis at this point, and a couple had lost their structural integrity (rather like one of my own balls), but they were just about playable (rather like the other one of my balls). I bought some new ones (though occasionally one of the old ones slips into rotation) and the rest of the Ultra Vis balls are still in their tins.
And what I love about it is that now they are obviously just mess around balls for the dog and kids to play with, so they get an extra bit of life and value to their 75p each price. It really doesn't matter if they get lost or chewed up (I wish Ernie would stop eating them though). They have served their time (no pun intended) and are still going.
I could never have known when I bought those tennis balls, maybe in the 1900s (which seems insane) that I'd still have them all this time later, but also of course, I didn't know then that I was buying a toy for kids and a dog who did not yet exist. There's something faintly magic about it, no? I was unwittingly buying tiny moments of joy for some people and a dog that I would love more than anything (especially the dog). They were unknowable and yet somewhere in the future, my magic balls would be there for them.
And all I cared about was the fact that I was saving £7 a tin. Which to be fair is pretty amazing. That's about how much it costs to buy one tennis ball now.
