Distraction

You get tired, you get distracted. You get distracted, you make mistakes. This is a tale of sad errors from which I should learn, though I probably shan’t.

It’s also a bit of a counterweight to my previous post in which I guiltily admitted to an act of theft from twenty years ago. The dishonesty was minor, and inadvertent, but I never put things right and that may have left a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. So let’s have a story about some honesty instead. 

Danielle and I live outside the fine Spanish city of Valencia, but we had to go into town a few days ago. I was tired and finding it difficult to think clearly. As I got ready, I couldn’t make up my mind whether I needed any money with me. 

Should I take my shoulder bag? A waste of time, I decided, just an additional weight to carry and, besides, something I could lose.

The shoulder bag

But perhaps I should take the wallet from inside it? Yes, that might work. But I couldn’t button the hip pocket with the wallet in it. Carrying the wallet in an open pocket, partly sticking out? Not a smart move.

So I put the wallet back in the shoulder bag and decided to take neither with me, as I planned initially. Less cluttered. Less to lose. Less to worry about.

The wallet

Then, at the last moment, I grabbed the shoulder bag after all.

Well, I was clearly in no fit state to rely on my decision processes. I wasn’t thinking clearly or I wouldn’t have kept changing my mind. But when you’re not thinking clearly, you stop thinking clearly about your lack of clarity of thought. Unaware of how distracted I was, I had no idea how little I could count on myself to behave without distraction.

After we’d done the things we went into town for, Danielle and I took a break at for a coffee. Well, in my case, what I had was a blanco y negro, since we were in my favourite ice cream shop. A blanco y negro is crushed iced coffee with a ball of vanilla ice cream. An excellent variant on the standard coffee, and a great way of combining the kick of the coffee with the indulgence of the ice cream. Particularly suitable on a hot day.

Blanco y negro

It was when I came to pay for the drinks that I found my wallet wasn’t there. 

That’s a funny way of putting it, isn’t it? I mean what I found was that I couldn’t find my wallet. Or, you might say, I found my wallet unfound.

Well, I’d been so vague and undecided that morning that I wondered whether my memory was betraying me and that I had, in fact, not put the wallet back in the shoulder bag before I left. We decided not to panic and went home. Both of us then searched the place in turn. Thoroughly. There was no sign of the wallet. It remained as unfound as ever.

So I went back to town and went to the various places we’d been. Nothing doing. Unfound as ever.

At that point I decided that it had been stolen, and that made me feel strangely easier in my mind. Theft can happen to anyone, after all. Pickpockets are skilful. Pick-shoulder bags too, no doubt. This wasn’t down to my stupidity, it was all about petty crime and petty criminals will always be with us.

I started out on the task of cancelling cards. That went well until I got to an English credit card that I still, for reasons I can’t readily explain, hang on to.

“Yes, sir,” they said to me, “could you give me the number of the card, please?”

Well, no, actually, since the whole point was that it had been stolen.

Fortunately, I eventually found a statement with the number, and was able to block that card too. At least I couldn’t be ripped off for large sums of money.

On the other hand, the wallet also contained two vital bits of documentation. One was my ‘NIE’ declaring me officially resident in Spain. The other was my ‘SIP’ card confirming my access to the Spanish health service. That was particularly vital since I was about to have my second Covid shot and would need the card.

Not irreplaceable, but damn difficult to replace

Neither is irreplaceable. Neither is easily replaced. Especially the NIE card. It can take months just to get an appointment to sort it out, and in my experience, it can never be sorted out with just one appointment. 

But then, joy and delight! I got a call from the police. Not generally a cause for celebration (e.g. if you’re Donald Trump). But it was in this case.

Someone had found my wallet. And they’d handed it in.

I shot into town to collect it and nothing was missing. The now useless credit cards were there, but much more important, so was my NIE, so was my SIP. Why, even the couple of banknotes and the few coins were there, along with my metro cards and other less crucial things.

What a relief it was to have them back. And, I hope you agree, a pleasant anecdote to the tale of my dishonesty over the bread knife. Although, to be fair, I have also myself found lost wallets a two or three times and always ensured they got back to their owners.

Once that meant standing in front of St Pancras station to meet the owner and missing my own train home, though I was happy to do so, just to see the relief on her face. 

Another time, when the lost piece of property wasn’t a wallet, but a Filofax, turned out to be less of a success. I found the owner’s phone number and rang it.

“Oh, thanks so much for finding it and letting me know!” she said.

“A pleasure,” I replied, and went on to the obvious next question, “how do you want to collect it?”

“Could you bring it to me here?”

She lived in West London. I was in Central London. I lived in Luton which is north of London. I loved the gall of even suggesting I was going to add a couple of hours to my trip just to give her back the property she’d carelessly mislaid.

“I’ll leave it at the ticket office,” I told her, as I’d found the Filofax in a station, “and you can collect it from there.”

I hope she got it back. And was as pleased about it as I was about being reunited with my wallet. 

I do, however, have one remaining concern. If the wallet wasn’t stolen, I have no easy explanation of its disappearance and can only blame my own distraction. And how on earth am I going to make sure I don’t suffer that again?