Lost or stolen

I was wondering what to write about this time - Brexit maybe, or driving on French roads.  But those will have to wait.  Last week, while we were visiting Montpellier with our guests, Mary's wallet was stolen from her handbag.  Soon after we heard that a friend from Wirksworth had had an identical experience during a family visit here in April.  A day aftewards I realised I was also missing some papers, not as valuable but annoying all the same, and though I thought I'd just left them somewhere I now think they were stolen at the same time.

The scenario is all too familiar.  You are waiting on a busy platform to get on a tram or train which is also crowded.  People push to get off, you are anxious to get on before the doors close and only later you find that something is missing from your bag.  It has happened to friends in Paris, London, Barcelona, and so on.  The immediate feeling is a confused mixture of foolishness that you allowed it to happen, anxiety about the possiblitiy of further theft from credit cards and so on, and helplessness.

I can write more calmly now because we have done all we can to cancel cards, reapply for missing documents and so on.  When I left my entire bag with cards and even my passport in a café on a coach journey in Portugal 2 years since it was stolen afterwards becausse it was never found but my passport was recovered in a ditch later and even posted back to me!  Mostly cancelling cards is straightforward and you get replacements quickly.  But dealing with bureucracy to replace a driving licence or passport for instance is bound to be complicated - I felt more positive because after Portugal I treated this as a chance to learn more French and technical terminology!

I cannot for the life of me see why Britich banks insist on asking you complicated security questions when you phone to ask for a card to be cancelled.  OK, there might be a few cases where malicious pranksters cancelled your card for a laugh, but no thief is going to cancel a card they hope to use fraudulently, so why not block the card quickly without adding to the stress by asking the poor owner to remember the third letter of a password they have scarcely ever had cause to use?  The French bank attached to the post office won the prize hands down, cancelling both my and Mary's cards without fuss and sending us replacements within just a few days.

So with the usual benefit of hindsight, here are a couple of tips if you are travelling.

• It seems all too convenient to carry all your important things together but don't - use different zipped pockets for separate cards and so on, and leave what you don't need on the day at home.
• If you are using busy public transport, and have a choice of places to change as we did, choose a less busy interchange.  I chose the busiest because I thought it would be interesting for our visitors to look around while waiting for the other tram, and there were calmer places to make the same change.
• Try and work out a way of remembering phone numbers and dealing with security questions if you do have to phone banks.  My worst moments when Mary was upset by her loss were trying to remember details of our accounts which I know when calm but which escaped me in the ambient panic!
• Remember that for most people life goes on, and sharing your distress with everyone is no use to them or you.  Our most positive moment was leaving our guests to enjoy their day in Montpellier while we set out back home to try and sort out the admin.  It was better for them and for us.

One of the most difficult feelings I've dealt with since is the idea that there are people out there aiming to get you.  We would all like to believe that the people around us are honest, but a few work hard to perfect methods of theft like this or to break into houses.  I also felt a passing rage that most people around me since are totally indifferent to our (comparatively minor) problems, and then a humbling realisation that there are people with far greater difficulties and misfortunes which destroy lives or ways of life.  So I finish with some photos I took yesterday of some irises we discovered under our hedge yesterday - beautiful and unexpected, and still there in the glorious sunshine this morning, along with a rose I cut by mistake while dead-heading which is now on the table nearby;