One Lonely Beam In The Dark

It happens to everyone, inevitably. You arrive home one day and realise that something is missing. If you're lucky, it's something utterly invaluable and you carry on with your life, or you walk out the door and find the lost item on the doorstep. If you're not so lucky, then you have to go looking. In the dark, during a windy frigid drizzle.

Cut to black. You're retracing your footsteps along a dark and windswept path, waving your torch all around to ward off spooks and try to spot what you've lost. You're very thorough, even as rain blots out your bespectacled vision and your fingers go numb from the February cold. You just have to find it! Losing things is not to be permitted! You go all the way up, and then come all the way back down. The flashlight peers into bushes, patches of field through a barbed wire fence, and onto tops of hedges, and nothing is to be seen but stray beer cans and bits of wrapper. The cold seeps into your bones and you begin to give up. It would have been easier to stay in and relinquish it, and maybe watch 'Mission: Impossible' or 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea' instead of this.

Then, swishing your torch around all the while, you reluctantly wend your way home, resigning yourself to buying a replacement. What nuisance, what a typical event in what should have been a surplus week! Your front door looms our of the misty and rainy dark and you manage to click off your light and the red bike lamp you've been waving behind you as a warning. Then, you make it inside and wince in pain as your fingers begin to warm up, until you get them all back in working order. What were you doing before going on that fruitless quest? Oh, putting the things from your tutoring trip away. You go back to your bag, previously searched, and pull out a carrier bag with something mysteriously soft within.

What is in the bag? Is it the item for which you have spent half an hour searching in the frozen outdoors? It is, isn't it? You open the bag, and there is the scarf. The lost scarf. The scarf you never even had to buy as it was found one day on a bush in the middle of nowhere, near Aberystwyth.

Mondays have a reputation for a reason.

O.