Somewhere, I have a photograph of me sitting on a small boat in the bay of Villefranche, east of Nice. Taken by a friend's son, it captures the exact moment my mobile phone slipped - without any human eyes noticing - from the pocket of my shorts on its way to the bottom of the Mediterranean. Not all of the things I mislay are lost quite so comprehensively, however ...
One warm Abu Dhabi evening, a taxi driver collected four of us, including a colleague who had just flown in from Canada, outside The National’s offices, and dropped us for dinner at a hotel. And then drove away with our colleague’s luggage in the boot.
In life’s catalogue of lost and found stories, this was one with a happy ending. My custom was to note the mobile phone numbers of taxi drivers who spoke good English. As luck would have it, ours did. We were able to call him immediately and he readily agreed to return.
I have not always been so fortunate. In London, I mislaid a big bunch of keys needed to unlock and start the car, enter the house and let myself into my daughters’ flat. I retraced every step, calling at a restaurant, an internet cafe and shops as well as checking with London Transport and the police, all to no avail.
That was more nuisance than disaster as copies could be made and I had spares for the car. But it is astonishing what else people contrive to lose: wives left behind at motorway service stations, valuable rings swallowed but retrieved through means too delicate to recount here. How many events attracting families also have stray children announcements? Walk down suburban streets and you find lost pet notices on lampposts and trees.
In truth, I cannot grumble about my own record. Another taxi driver, in Miami, returned to my hotel (which had booked the cab for me) with the sunglasses I’d left on the back seat; he mentioned unnecessarily that he had not at first thought of me because their style seemed feminine.
In France, the manager of an insurance office put my spectacles case aside in the knowledge they could only be mine. I was the only customer likely to have a case bearing the name and address of an optician in the UAE.
Too late to be of use, I once found a long-lost French health card trapped underneath a computer base on the day removal people arrived to cart it off. I had already talked the authorities into issuing a replacement. My UAE credit card turned up in the London store where I just knew I had inadvertently left it, but only after the shop had initially reported no trace and prudent bank staff in Dubai had irrevocably blocked it. It would take all day to list all the coins, pens and other objects discovered under the cushions of seats and settees.
You may be getting the idea I am absent-minded. Not at all. But there was that time 40 years ago in Northern Ireland, as the Troubles erupted, when I stepped from a bus and realised my guitar was in the rack above my seat. “Don’t worry, son,” said an elderly woman. “It’s the town circular service. It’ll be back.” Sure enough, 45 minutes later, it was. Lawless as the town in question then was, the guitar lay undisturbed where it had been left.
* This first appeared in my East/West column in The National, Abu Dhabi.
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