Encouraging - and plain stupid

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?

BAstards or BAAstards?

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Originally uploaded by danlinwood.

It's been two weeks. Two weeks since I left my personal stuff on a BA plane as it landed at Glasgow, two weeks of complete frustration verging on rage as I tried to contact someone who might be able to tell me something of its fate. Apart from the hours spent hanging on the phone, I have now visited Glasgow Airport (at a cost of £5 for parking) and spoken with two managerial types - one from BA, the other from BAA. No joy - the BA chap reckoned it would have been dumped. I think this too - probably after my rather nifty little earphones had been removed - but now want to focus on the process.

The first breakthrough came in finding the number to call Glasgow Airport: 0870 0400008. You get an automated voice giving you options, and press button 3 to get to Lost Property. You then press button 3 again to get to "property left on an aeroplane", and then button 1 to get to "property left on a BA plane". Then, at last, a phone rings. By this time hope is welling up - will a real, live person answer?

Dear reader, the answer is a resounding No. Not ever, at whatever hour of the day or night you phone. I have now lost in the mists of despair the routes by which I did talk to a helpful but brisk chap in Gatwick (but no-one answered the number he gave me) and a nice girl in Glasgow Airport who sent someone to check the relevant office for me but rang me back (yes!) with the news that there was no-one there. By this time Mr B's boarding pass was covered in phone numbers and I was losing the will to live.

I psyched myself up a bit for a visit to Glasgow Airport, but in fact the meeting with the two aforementioned chaps has been, in the end, as useless as anything else. The Customer Services Operations Manager did try the novel experiment of phoning the same chain of numbers as I had, and promised to get back to me when he found out what the correct number should be and what was going on. He rang me once to tell me he was still working on it, and I rang him when he failed to phone again. On that occasion he told me another, direct number to phone: 0141 207 9018. Guess what. No-one answers that phone either.

Did I mention that I'd also used the website to mail an enquiry? The final mail from the person who is dealing with it ended with these words: "I realise we have not met our usual high standards this time, and I hope that there will be more for you to enjoy when you next fly with us."

Maybe I shall fly with BA again. I know it was my fault that I was so dozy that I forgot my stuff. But it must happen all the time. If this is the useless procedure that BA have in place to make a perfectly reasonable attempt to contact them, there must be all sorts of lost baggage chucked into black bags. Let's just hope someone, somewhere, makes a security check first.

Distraught of Dunoon

Home from the bright lights (and were they bright!) to a blizzard, a temperature of 3ºC and a sticking z (just found that out). And I'm almost too distraught to blog, having abandoned on the floor of the plane from London this morning a bag containing my reading specs (the ones I look at the laptop through), my book (half-read) and, worst of all, my diary. Not the one with the appointments in it, but the one with my life in it. I can't bear it.

And though there was a man at Gatwick able to tell me it hadn't turned up there when the plane returned, the phone at Glasgow rang and rang. Unlike Vegas, Glasgow shuts down on Sunday. All very right and holy, I'm sure, but deeply frustrating.

Normal service will be resumed when I get my specs back. Meantime, the photos are beginning to go up on flickr and I have the Diocesan Synod to prepare for. Joy.