I’ve lost something. It’s a booklet about the work of the horror film director Norman J Warren, which I bought at a film festival around thirty years ago, and then had signed by Warren. I’ve just bought a new blu-ray boxset of Warren’s work so I decided to hunt out the booklet only to discover that it’s not in its usual place – a place that it has been for literally as long as I can remember – and doesn’t seem to be elsewhere either. I’ve been looking for it on and off for about a week now, hoping it’ll turn up sandwiched between records, books or magazines, or maybe in a box otherwise bulging with bills and receipts. As each ‘it might be here’ brainwave comes to nothing the possibility that it’s been turfed out by accident becomes increasingly more likely.
The thing is, I’m taking the loss of this booklet badly. I’m being a bit of a baby about it, if I’m honest. I’m sure it was quite rare (I can’t even find an image of it on the whole of the internet), I’ve had it for years, it was very precious to me and it was signed by Warren. But even so. It was just a booklet, about the size and shape of a parish magazine, not a family member or friend. I really should not be feeling its loss quite as keenly as I do. I’ve grieved less for far more.
So that’s my question — help me feel better — have you ever lost anything, apparently trivial, that’s turned you inside out?
Leicester Bangs says
–>
SteveT says
Frequently.
When I was a mere whippersnapper I did a pencil drawing of Captain America. It was brilliant – everyone said so. I was not a particularly good drawer but this was exceptional by my standards.
No idea where it went to but the loss was agonising.
Also I lost a Victoria Williams cd that I may have only ever played twice. When I realised I had lost, it quickly became the most valuable cd in my collection. I could have probably bought a cheap replacement but that is not the same. I want my lost one.
dai says
A letter from my dad, the last one he wrote to me before he died.
Leicester Bangs says
Oh God, I’m so sorry to hear that.
dai says
Ah it’s ok, thanks. Can still remember a lot of it even though it’s more than 30 years ago. Moving at least a dozen times since has it’s cost.
Rigid Digit says
Frequently – I think of something, go looking for it, and if I can’t find it I become obsessed with finding it.
Recent obsession have ranged from the important (my birth certificate) to the totally trivial (a book about the London Underground).
I’ve also lost 2 completed Panini sticker books from 1984 and 1985 – I just know these were thrown away, but no-one will ever admit it
And then there is the misfiling problem – I wanted to listen to a Crash Test Dummies CD (no idea why?), but it wasn’t in the C section.
2 weeks later after much scouring of the shelves I found it stuck between a Mod Revival compilation and a Ska compilation (in the Various Artists section, in a completely different set of shelves)
The adage says: if you lose something, it’s always in the last place you look.
Of course it is – why would you keep searching for something after you’ve found it?
Locust says
Usually if I “lose” something, it’s because I’ve removed it from its original unlogical and unsafe dwelling place to a new, perfectly logical, brilliant, only-sane-place-to store-it spot which is so bloody brilliant that I just can’t remember where it is ever again…while I’ll still try to look for it in the original place for years after its disappearance.
If it was such a small booklet, could your brilliant idea of a safe space for it have been inside the covers of a book on a related subject?
Leicester Bangs says
This, this and this. Putting it in a safe place is almost certainly what I’ve done. (I hope, because the alternative is worse.)
Will deffo be checking inside books as well as between them. Thanks!
SteveT says
Also, I had a John Hiatt compilation cd that I really liked. If I am on a long journey in a car I will eject a cd after listening to it and put it in the nearest cd case I can reach from the passenger seat. This might not be the cd case that said cd belongs to but there is an express understanding in my head that when I arrive at my destination it gets transferred to its correct case.
In this particular instance it didn’t happen and when I next wanted to play the cd it was not in its case. It bugged me for a number of months before I ordered a replacement.
Have a guess what? Almost as soon as the replacement arrived the original turned up. Oh well at least I was able to return to the Tax Dodgers so they are not all bad.
retropath2 says
But is anything really ever lost? (Yes, but….) I have a habit of putting stuff safe, like @locust , tucked away for future ease of reference. I also lose a lot of stuff. The one that irks me most is a leather wrist thong/bracelet, given me by my wife a few Christmases back. It is on my 3rd loss of it, as it has a wonky fastener. The first time I found it under the car seat, always now my first port of call for anything where it shouldn’t be. That felt good. The second time took a week, I spotting it in the garage, by some paint tin shelving. Given, like most people, the garage and the car never co-habit, and I hadn’t been painting for years, it was a surprise but a welcome one. This time, some weeks down the line, I remain hopeful, if unrealistically.
But, to return to my philosophical opener, I have a greater belief in thing being not yet found than being irrevocably lost. This is the theory I apply when I “lose” memory of a word I am seeking in my head. Experience has taught me against wracking my brain, my solution being to think of something completely different, to free up the space for the elusive word to suddenly pop back in. So far it usually does. If push comes to shove I will open a dictionary or a thesaurus and start searching, knowing the mystery word will arrive ahead of the page with it on. At work this translates to opening up the BNF (british national formulary), when it is a drug name I have ‘lost’, telling my patient what I am doing, so they don’t mistake me for senile or stupid.
johnw says
We’ve lost a DVD from a box set. Obviously it’s replaceable but we’ve wasted a stupid amount of time looking for it. I’ve opened an old dvd player twice to see if it’s inside! If and when we do find it, it’ll be in the last place we look!
salwarpe says
When I first started getting into music, my first love was Status Quo. I had a tape recording off a friend in the village of 12 Gold Bars, which I played again and again, until my parents got the message what I wanted for Christmas – more Quo.
Down down to Dorset we went to see elderly relatives at the end of December, an unexciting prospect for a young teen – living on an island (of Purbeck) for a whole week, all I had to look forward to was the prospect of Rossi, Parfitt, Lancaster and Coughlan whisking my ears off to a world of boogie and repetitive chords.
I wrote up on Christmas morning with a full stocking, and stuffed inside, with the tangerine and walnut was a collection of Quo stickers and cotton/polyester mix patches to sew onto my recently-acquired denim jacket.
If this was the aperitif, what was the main course to be? What great Quo album would I be opening after Queen’s Speech?
Well, when I tore off the paper, plain before my eyes was Pictures of Matchstick Men, a collection of their early acid-tinged gentle pop, accessorised by the boys in their finest paisley and pageboy haircuts. I tried to roll over and lay down my disappointment, but my parents said – we can see it wasn’t whatever you wanted.
Still, at least I had the Quo patches, didn’t I? No. Sometime during the whirl and rustle and disposal of wrapping paper, they’d disappeared. Somewhere on the wild side of life, I think they are still out there, but I will never see them again. It makes me a tiny bit sad and incomplete, even to this day – a mystery songs like Ice in the Sun and Black Veils of Melancholy remind me of, whenever I hear them.
Rigid Digit says
Did you check that they hadn’t gone down the dustpipe?
Beezer says
You sound accident prone
fishface says
ISomething larger…a Suzuki X7.
At the time my absolute pride and joy.
The first Japanese 2stroke 250 able to crack the magic ton….just.
Mine was a flaming red, slightly tuned and running the der rigueur Allspeeds, straight Renthal bar and green Baja grips.
She was a peach and I was JUST able to afford the repayments to my dad.
The conversation went something like…”Did you lock yer bike up last night”?
“Er, yeah… I think….why”?
“Well it’s not under the lean too”. We did not have a garage.
Me…..”Fucking shitting bastard thieving fucking” etc etc and some crying…I was 20 and on L plates, you could ride a genuine 100mph 250cc bike on learner plates in 1980!
Never saw her again and as I only had 3rd party insurance never received any compo.
You never forget your first love.
NigelT says
I had the paperback of A Hard Day’s Night – no idea where that went. I know for sure it wouldn’t have been thrown out, but I can only think somone ‘borrowed’ it, sadly. I really, really want it to turn up!
Paul Wad says
I temporarily lose CDs quite regularly, because I am constantly rearranging my shelves when I buy new ones and ones that overspill from the shelves they would naturally go (arranged in genres) tend to get shoved where I can fit them.
Probably the thing(s) I lost that gave me the most annoyance was a pile of magazine cuttings. Namely, all the Barnsley FC related pictures and team posters I’d taken out of football comics/magazines since childhood. It was a sizeable pile and most of it had adorned my bedroom walls as a kid. I have a feeling it got caught up with some papers/magazines that my wife threw out, but it was a little collection I had no chance of ever getting hold of again.
Beezer says
My late Dad’s signet ring, given to me by my mother when he died. Lost somewhere in a rented room in a house in Norbury about 4 years later when I left home.
Deeply saddening and much regretted. I can be a clumsy and forgetful oaf and I’ve upset people in this way a few times since.
fentonsteve says
The last time it snowed, Mrs F lost her engagement ring. It either went in the paper towel bin in the ladies loo at work, or fell on the snow-covered tarmac when she took her gloves off after scraping snow off the car. It was my birthday and she arrived home in tears. I then spent until midnight in the snow, with floodlights and a Henry hoover, removing the seats and carpets from her car with no joy.
A replacement was provided under our household insurance, but it wasn’t the same. I bought the original in Sydney and proposed at Uluru, for a start…
Beezer says
Argghhh… I feel that
Beezer says
I wear contact lenses during the day and come the evening I take them out and put glasses on.
Usually, I’ll do this sitting on one of our two sofas, arranged in a L-shape along two walls of our living room. A big coffee table sits in front of both at which I’ll open up the little contact lens holder and fill both halves with lens cleaning fluid.
Sometimes I’ll fumble the lids of these little holders and one of them will fall on the floor. Always always always fucking always they won’t handily sit at my feet for me to simply pick up. No, they bounce directly under one of the sofas and sit precisely just out of reach of my infuriated hand. Moving either of these sofas means major family upheaval which would Disrupt Lounging and Internet Surfing, so I have to hope I have a few spare holders knocking about somewhere I then have to go and fucking find. Often with just one lens in.
Mike_H says
I’ve always been one of those people who loses things.
Jackets left in pubs never to be seen again.
Banknotes and coins that fell out of pockets.
Treasured badges that fell off clothing unnoticed until too late.
Work tools. Loads and loads of those. Some stolen but mostly just mislaid.
Books, vinyl albums, cassettes and CDs during changes of address.
A wheelbrace and tow rope I forgot to remove from my previous car when it was scrapped.
My mum’s treasured really excellent-quality Irish bedlinen. A wedding present from when she married my dad, mistakenly thrown in a skip after she died (my sister has still not forgiven me and it was nearly 20 years ago. She’d put it all in a couple of black bin bags and I thought it was just some of the bags of rubbish from the house).
Etc. etc.
Locust says
I can temporarily “lose” stuff inside of my own flat, but outside of my home I’m so careful about not losing things – my own and everybody else’s – that in my misspent youth I’d always get the assignment of looking after my friends’ things when we went out to get shitfaced. And I always drank twice the amount of anyone else (to achieve half their drunkenness), but never lost anything, always reminded everyone of important facts (like times and places to meet), and kept an eye on them so nothing really bad would happen. The one time my best friend was temporarily in charge of our stash of cigarrettes, lighters etc for the weekend, she left the bag in a bush she was using as an emergency WC, and we lost about two cartons worth of smokes in one quick moment (she couldn’t find her way back to the bush, and someone else must have found it first because we looked in every damn bush in the area…)
I’m that slightly annoying person who’s constantly running after strangers with things they left behind in shops, bus shelters etc, and asking my friends “Did you take your (insert item of choice)?” when we leave somewhere. Annoying, but useful.
I can feel myself get ever so slightly tense every time I see someone putting down their bag (or anything really) somewhere to have both hands free to do something else…I can already feel them getting distracted and forgetting all about it!
I guess I should relax a bit, really! 😀
retropath2 says
Please will you befriend my daughter…..
Locust says
Haha, I’ve got enough stress in my life thanks to my brother, who has never left any location without leaving something (preferably expensive) behind. In fact, I think we just discovered the root of my behaviour right there… 🙂
moseleymoles says
One item I mourn above all others is a pair of Japan flag trousers asI think worn by the clash and advertised at the back of the NME. My pride and joy aged 16 and in studenthood/rented moves they disappeared never to return. Not that I’d wear them, perhaps frame them.
bobness says
I was reminded today that I’ve not seen the browny-grey envelope with all my O and A level and degree exam papers in it, since we moved house.
I’ll be miffed if that’s gone missing, but I’m sure it must be somewhere.
myoldman says
I lost mine years ago but needed them for immigration paperwork. I’ve moved countries a fair bit. The best I could do was email the school I went to and send my brother’s mother-in-law with cash down there a week later to pick up the computer print with the results on.
Mike_H says
Many years ago during my years living in West Wales I lost a lens out of my glasses after a direct hit in the face with a snowball. This occurred in the middle of a large snow-covered field. A feeble search was made at the time but it was hopeless with about 3″ of snow everywhere.
A couple of weeks later, after the snow had melted, I had another look and found it undamaged.
retropath2 says
I found a lost skean dhu under similar circumstances. Well, snow. Returning from a Burns Supper I took the dog out round the block. I lost my wee dagger on the way, it being part of a hired ensemble, before I had my own. Despite the insurance, the gents outfitters in question were very iffy about it, reluctantly accepting my tale. There was, mind, the loss of my deposit, no small amount, so, imagine my surprise, a week and a thaw later I found it. And got my deposit back. With a struggle.