Finders Keepers?

On Friday 3rd September 2010 my iphone 3GS was stolen. Correction, more precisely at somewhere between 2.30AM and 4AM on Saturday 4th September my bag was rummaged through, in my tent, where I slept alone somewhere in a field 10 minutes drive from Moffat, Dumfries at Eden Festival.

What has happened since ranges from odd to some other emotions I think it’s easiest to group as extreme moodiness. The idea of losing your own personal possessions through no personal error is annoying. From pick pocketing on the airport train into Barcelona to car theft in any one of the six hundred and forty three random places it happens - like zoo car parks - ‘It’s my stuff’ is the initial thought. ‘Why is it any use to you?’ – ‘it’s probably drugs’, I tellingly and drolly murmured at the police when I reported my shit missing.

I’ve never been robbed before. Never personally anyway, my family went through the 80s and 90s living in Bris-UK’s-hot-spot-for-car-crime-tol (taken over by Leeds late 90s I believe) and we seemed to lose a car weekly. I remember mum and dad not coming home from the theatre because the Astra (navy, desirable) had been nabbed and was found ‘wrapped round a lamppost’. The image haunts still. But I’ve never been robbed. I’ve caught pickpockets three times actually opening zips and grabbing at bags, and the violation still wrangles. It’s this immediate subconscious feeling of ‘it’s not yours to touch, let alone take, and its shagging attached to me’. Often this is verbalised as noisy human noises.

I’ve chosen not to use a phone for the rest of the week. Part in protest, partly so I didn’t get too het up that the Vodafone replacement sim didn’t arrive. It’s an odd one. I genuinely thoroughly still feel that I should be able to reach back in time, wake up at an opportune moment and scream blue murder (or purple theft) ... and snatch my wonder gadget back from the clutches of whichever kiniveing sludge living on the edge of a disused toilet left over from last year’s hippy fest covered in dead racoons and mouldy pigs ears is currently sitting in my tent. They’d be startled that that sleeping bag there contains a person who has possessions and genuinely believes it’s their right to keep them.

And my parents did eventually come home from the theatre; we had some hippy couple babysitting. I quite liked the drama. At four years old. Who would have thought?