Lockdown in Paris : Day Twenty-Six
Saturday 11th April
I must confess I can’t start today’s post in the usual fashion by noting the time at which I got up, because I don’t think I can honestly say I really ever did get up. I mean sure, I fetched the occasional cup of tea or coffee, I boiled a bit of pasta which I paired with a questionable sauce, I think at one point I took off yesterday’s make-up, but to give you a time stamp and say - then is when I rose from my bed - would be to lie. I haven’t lied yet and I don’t plan on starting now.
I can’t add a time stamp to tell you when I fell asleep again to the dulcet tones of a documentary about cold-blooded murderers. Can’t tell you when I woke up again, having had confusing dreams intermingled with the testimony of those on Death Row. I’m not sure when or why I decided to start watching Luther again from the beginning, but I can tell you I’m halfway through Season Two. I ate most of the peanut M&Ms, munching them doggedly even when I knew I didn’t want any more. They were there, therefore I ate them. I see therefore I eat.
It will not surprise you that my team once again lost the quiz, however there was an uncanny stroke of luck in the form of the question, “Which Henry was King in 1422?” Even through the white wine I was able to triumphantly type HENRY V 1413 - 1422 and that means this whole week was a success based on that fact alone.
At some point I decided that I would finally start a new crochet project, and so the ladder was descended for wool and a hook. I chose a pattern I’ve made before (and am therefore less likely to mess up, and more likely to be able to watch Luther while crocheting). I crochet because I find knitting much less forgiving with regards to mistakes, and I have a habit of making many.
I would say it was around 19h45 that I made chicken with sweet potato mash. While cooking on the front hotplate I like to balance my laptop on top of a pan on the rear hotplate (not in use, I’m not completely mad). If I need both hotplates I put the laptop on a chopping board balanced over the sink. I am not very sensible when it comes to my own belongings and potential hazards. It has been remarked upon. Sometimes I amuse myself by putting my laptop in precarious situations, taking a photo and sending it to Polly-in-Berlin, who finds this facet of my humour quite harrowing. Of course one of these days this will backfire and my laptop will plummet five floors to the tarmac below, all in the name of a good chuckle, but there’s no changing me now.
I think it’s the same chip (or lack thereof?) that makes me forgetful of absolutely anything I have about my person. It’s best that I do not own umbrellas, given how briefly I own them. I’m quite sure there are many umbrellas I never even noticed losing. The only reason I remember a forgotten umbrella is if it happens to still be raining when I leave the place in which I have left it. Not just umbrellas, mind. Once I got on a ferry to a Croatian island having left my suitcase in a café where I had just very much enjoyed an ice cream sundae. When I realised, (How come everyone else has a bag, and yet I do not have a bag? Oh, god.) I returned to the café to find not only my suitcase but, on the table, my sunglasses, a bottle of suncream and my book. I suppose I just wandered off.
I’m always wandering off. When travelling the world, Rhi-and-El-of-Wales had what they liked to call a “Nearly Lost List” to keep tabs on the things they had gallantly saved me from wandering away from. This was quickly joined by a “Lost List.” Our first stop was Hong Kong and I left my bag on the first train we got on. A nice man threw it to me just as the doors were closing. That was the girls’ first introduction to what would be almost six months of Nearly Losing or Definitely Lost. I can still see that bag flying at me through the thinning gap of the doors. And I do hope someone’s getting some use out of my camera somewhere in Thailand, which I abandoned in the back of a Bangkok taxi.
I don’t ever particularly lament the lost things. I meet their disappearance with a kind of cheerful equanimity - I suppose realistically I always expected it to happen, so I was just happy to have had the things while I had them. I left my laptop under the seat of the Eurostar a few years back and it got nicked. That was the worst one - not because I lost it, but because someone hadn’t been kind enough to hand it in. This upset me more than the losing. In retrospect I was absolutely bound to lose it - the moment I put it down out of sight under my own bum it was lost forever. But I never do learn. Only this summer I left my phone on top of some hay bales in Flintshire. A nice lady found it and called Polly-in-Berlin who called Rhi-of-Wales who passed on my home number, where my mum must have said something along the lines of Oh yes that sounds about right. She called my sister, with whom I was at the festival in Flintshire with the hay bales, who called the nice lady who had found my phone. We met the next day by the hay bales. You meet nice people when you lose things.
I’m on a roll now, I’m afraid to say. In December I left my phone in the toilets of Manchester Airport. I wandered about looking at books in WHSmith right up to boarding time, an inconvenient point at which to realise you have left your phone in the toilets of Manchester Airport. I gave up the hunt for it after talking to a nice cleaner lady who hadn’t found it, and then just as they started boarding a voice came on the tanoy saying - rather tantalisingly - If anyone’s lost a mobile phone, please come to security. Well that was me wasn’t it, and there I was about to fly away from my phone in a Boeing 737. I think that’s certainly the fastest I’ve ever wandered away from anything. I spoke to the nice Easyjet lady and I pointed at the ceiling and said “That’s me!” And she looked at me like I was mad. “The phone. I’ve lost that phone. Can I make it to security and back here in time?” It was a long run. It was a really, really long run, and I had a 4kg solid granite Mortar and Pestle in my suitcase (Christmas present). She looked at me, then looked at the line, then looked at her watch. It was quite exciting really, except for the fact that I was actually going to have to run, like really run, and I was definitely not a Classpass regular at this point. “You can make it.” She said. “But you really do have to run.”
So I ran. I ran past the toilets and I ran past the bars, past WHSMith and past the Currency Exchange and through the perfumes and the sunglasses and all the way to security. They sent me to another bit of security. By this point my face was somewhere between purple and blue. “I’ve lost my phone,” I gasped to a magnificent woman who looked like she could single-handedly run Alcatraz. I pointed at the ceiling again, just to be clear. She didn’t even blink, this almighty paragon of female authority - I loved her. I really did, she was capability personified. I of course was a sweating disaster. This woman has clearly never wandered away from anything in her life. She had all my respect. “Colour?” Well in the face of this I forgot the colour of my phone - she was so SAS about it I don’t think I could’ve clearly stated my own address. I gathered my wits. “Green!” I said, a bit too triumphantly. “Anything else?” She looked right into my soul. Clearly, there was something else. “It’s got one of those poppy things on the back but it’s broken.” I think the last detail was a bit unnecessary but I was very eager to please. She smiled then, satisfied, and I loved her even more. She waved a hand, into which my phone was immediately delivered, placed there by some unseen underling. “My flight’s boarding.” I said. Again, pointless. She looked down on me from a great, great height that had only a little to do with her great, great height and said, “You’d better run then.”
All you have to do to stop this happening - for the rest of your life - is turn around! This was the refrain of Rhi-of-Wales, as I scattered my belongings around the world. She would say this while laughing in this lovely way that sort of made me want to go on losing things (which is handy because I always will anyway) just so people can say, Of course you did Steph, of course you left your bag in a service station with your wallet and your camera in it . They do it in this way that makes you feel known for all your idiocy, and very much loved anyway. This is an important distinction, I find. Rhi was there for the service station incident, too, by the way. Poor Rhi. I rang the service station from the passenger seat a few junctions on, when I realised my bag wasn’t with us anymore. It was found (I knew it would be, I’ve developed a sort of sixth sense for when things are truly gone. Like a Spidey sense, but much, much less useful) and Rhi said cheerfully, “We’ll turn around at the next junction, no problem.” We were on our way to El-of-Wales’ hen-party at the time, so perhaps I had done it subconsciously for a hit of World-Trip-Losing-Things nostalgia. “Nah.” I said, really meaning it. “It’ll still be there on Sunday.” The man on the phone sounded quite perplexed when I said I’d swing past for it in a couple of days, if they wouldn’t mind holding on to it for me. In fact it was on that Sunday that one of the nice girls on the hen-do had a thought and said “Oh god, your passport isn’t in there is it?” “No no!” I said, laughing, and then “Oh. Yes, it is, actually.”
How on earth did I get onto this subject? Well, I’m afraid this is what happens when you don’t keep track of the time. Or your belongings. I have a tendency of just - wandering off.
