This bank holiday weekend we hosted husband’s brother who, on the heels of the breakup of his long term romance, was in need of some country R&R. Several hours into his visit he lost his mobile phone while out on a ramble with husband. We scoured the presumed area where it was dropped before giving up and heading for the pub. Even securing the phone number of the lady working behind the wine bar failed to dispel the gloom of the lost mobile phone that enveloped him that evening.
The next morning while our house guest was taking a shower I noticed he had left his bath towel in the bedroom. I shouted through the bathroom door that I had left it over the stair railing for him, only for him to shout back that he had brought his own towel. Unsure whether to be insulted by this, I went back downstairs to make coffee. A few minutes later I heard the whir of a blowdryer and realized our houseguest had also brought his own small appliances with him. Distracted by trying to remember if I had ever met another man who blow dried his hair, I forgot about being insulted by the towel incident. I recalled that our house guest had arrived yesterday with only a compact black satchel, which at the time struck me as fastidious. No wonder this very prepared man was so disturbed by losing his mobile phone. I suspect the fact that he was capable of losing his phone was as disturbing to him as the loss of the phone itself.
After breakfast we set out to retrace the steps of the previous day’s ramble in a last ditch attempt to locate the phone. It was a beautiful day and the route was through the Chedworth wood, now lined with bluebells so hardly a hassle. At the top of the woods husband rang the lost phone one last time and, to his surprise, someone answered. A local man had picked it up the day before while out walking his dog. He had also put it on his own charger at home in case the owner called it and made several calls to people in the recently dialed list in an attempt to find the owner. We had assured our houseguest that if someone local found the phone this was likely to be the outcome. Needless to say it was a rather different result than our London-based houseguest expected. In ten minutes we were at the house of the man who had found the phone, thanking him for his kindness and for providing our houseguest with a much needed happy ending.
