A good moment - and a frustrating few days. The good moment came yesterday, in Glasgow, chatting with a cheerful bunch of pro-Palestine activists in Buchanan Street. They were selling small artefacts - bracelets, pins and so on - and sending the money they collected to a hospital in Gaza. One of them proudly showed me the receipt for their last donation - thousands of pounds - and the stuffed collecting tin with the day's takings. "Glasgow's been great" she told me. Some of them had been to Palestine as volunteers, and one of them, a woman in her 60s, looked familiar from way back in my CND days. I left them feeling slightly better about the world.
And the frustration? I've lost my music folder. Laid aside before the Advent Carol concert, so that I didn't inadvertently take out Fields of Gold when I had to sing In the deep midwinter, it has vanished. Neither myself nor Mr B (who took out the Advent music and put it together for me) has the slightest recollection of where it might be. We've searched bookcases, peered down the back of bookcases (thank goodness it wasn't there), clambered to the loft about ten times. I even spent a chilly fifteen minutes this evening in the church, putting on all the lights to peer under choir stalls and in dank recesses below the organ. I've phoned Mrs Heathbank as her music bag is identical to mine: no joy. We've found the toys we had mislaid in the holidays when they were needed (they were stupidly in the chest on which the Christmas tree was standing and emerged when we took it down) and realised that it really is time to do something about the loft. But there is no sign of my music.
It's in a red plastic folder. It's full of music, all carefully annotated. I am bereft. If it reads this ...stop. I'm being silly. But that's what happens when you fear for your marbles.
Now - who is it you pray to when you've lost something?
Update: ten minutes after I wrote the above, I found it. It was in my filing drawer, quite sensibly, but had slid down because of the weight of music in it. Prayer answered?
Prior to Christmas and as part of a fundraiser Bobby and I had our portrait made together. I picked them up and after we looked at them put them back in the envelope they came in. They lay on the dining room table until just before the Christmas party when I cleaned the table off. Now where are they?
ReplyDeleteI've looked in all the same places you have (as if we share our abode).
I love that you told us "it's in a red plastic folder," in case we come across it, I guess. Mine's in a manilla envelope.
Thing is, we will both find our lost things one day, "right there were we left it."
St Anthony.
ReplyDeleteI was supposed to be devoting this week to writing, but spent two hours yesterday morning looking for a set of notes that I knew I had. I discovered them in a place I had looked in several times - but under something else and face down!
ReplyDeleteThings move. They up sticks and wander about the house when no one is looking. It is a fact of life - mysterious, unfathomable and deeply frustrating, not to say spooky.
ReplyDeleteI once searched for a pile of strong brown envelopes containing photographs. It was February. I knew where they were. They weren't. Four months later I went to where they used to be, and they had returned from what I can only presume was a Spring break. They sat there mocking me brownly.
There is a similar phenomenon with teaspoons and underwear: at least one of the former will be left when you empty out the dishwater (despite a careful search beforehand); as for the latter, vests (trans: undershirts) always contrive to turn themselves inside out in the washing machine.
And let us not venture into the territory of how it is that supermarket trolleys can travel miles from their homes - and sometimes into foreign lands.
Can St Anthony help? More likely St Jude.
abf - you trying to be obscure?
ReplyDeleteNope. I'm a lost cause.
ReplyDelete