Pain in the Proverbial

Well the weekend away was lovely apart from the disappearance of my purse. I could have lost it – but it seems unlikely since it wasn’t found in the two places I know I went in after the last time I saw it, or on the road between – so I hesitate to say I think it was pinched. When I pulled my rucksack off my shoulder to post a letter it was wide open and the purse was missing. If I’d thrown it out (and I don’t really think I was that energetic in a bookshop to have jettisoned it further than perhaps the floor beneath my feet) it would have been found. I wasn’t potholing or rooting through undergrowth after all, I was trying to find a copy of Fahrenheit 451.

Losing a purse is a pain in the arse. Not only did it contain my credit and debit cards, but also every points card known to man, my train ticket home (£61 down the drain), my driving licence (£20 for a renewal), £60 in cash and some photos that mean a lot to me. It also contained tonnes of stamp cards and man I was close to getting that free coffee/money off in the greengrocers/book shop. It’s a right royal pain in the arse and is taking me effort and quite a bit of money to fix.

There is a little bit of me feels it simply cannot have been stolen. We were in a small rural town famous for it’s second hand books. If it was stolen when I think it was then the perpetrator must have been stalking tourists in a second hand book shop – it just shouldn’t be possible. But I suppose you get dodgy book lovers – someone buys Margaret Thatcher biographies after all.

So I now have a couple of days plastic free which will be interesting since everything I do is geared up for simplicity. I even pay for car parks by phone. I better get hunting for change down the back of the sofa.

On the upside I was away with my lovely friend who paid for cocktails for me which made everything feel somewhat better – even if one was dusted with what I thought was soil but actually turned out to be pepper. Plus before my purse disappeared I had bought four new (secondhand) children’s books and I still had a brunch bar in my rucksack to eat on the way home. Small mercies.