Up early and down to the Gilded Balloon to make the round of searches and enquiries for my bag and it’s valuable contents. All the while I kept asking myself “Why take it out with you anyway? What did you need it for? You’ve got a habit of being careless and now it’s bitten you on the arse. You’re the stupidest person of all time.� The only reason I had it on me was to transport my computer over to a café at lunchtime to try and get on-line, then I’d continued to lug it about all day. It was only ever going to end in tears.
Whilst I am a lucky person generally, I am also a pessimist and knew that the lost property searches and checks weren’t going to be fruitful. And they were not. Having exhausted every channel of enquiry save trawling though CCTV footage, it was over and the bag was lost. Stolen, rather.
This will sound silly but I’m attached to that computer. We’ve achieved quite a lot. I use it every day. To have it taken is distressing. It’s not only about the financial cost of replacing it, it’s the emotional cost of having an everyday work tool taken away. And when I think of some of the new work that’s on the hard drive I shudder. But it’s gone, and that’s that. It’s horrible to think that it hasn’t been destroyed, it still exists, but in someone else’s hands.
Met K, Rachel and Gareth outside the Café Royal and said my goodbyes. I was due at the airport and almost felt guilty towards my bag that I was leaving so soon, as if I should really have stayed on and investigated further. K said he’s investigate, and he’s pretty good at stuff like that. There’s still a small dot of hope.
How to look for positives, which apparently every situation must have. The theory being that if something negative happens, it changes your circumstance, and that new circumstance must hold with it some positive aspects. I don’t really know in this case. ‘You will never re-write that script and therefore never have the hassle of being a successful writer’ is the only sort of twisted positive to be found in this. Great. Arriving at the airport I thought ‘Well, at least having your hand luggage stolen is a good way of avoiding the hand luggage ban, nice one Stan!’ but then found out you can now take hand luggage onto the flight and so even that foolish, non-positive was wiped out.
Oh, sorry to bang on about this but it is obsessing me a bit. There were plenty of Police officers in the airport and I reported the loss to one. He was very, very helpful. But it’s gone and that’s that.
Arrived at Heathrow and trained into town to meet my friends Aria and Wade at their new pad on Wardour Street in Soho. They are lovely people and recently married out in America and this is the first I’ve seen of them since. Aria is from Atlanta, which is where I first met her, and she couldn’t have found a better husband in Wade who’s a true gentleman. Indeed, true gentlemen were going to be something of a theme to the evening as we went out for dinner and were joined by a man called Amechi Ihenacho, whom I recognised from a recent cover of The Chap magazine. He’s a formidable but immensely friendly man and we seemed to hit it off right away, indeed after dinner he invited me to “some horrible party, but it might be fun� which turned out to be the 100th edition celebrations for Front magazine, some Lad’s Mag. It was in a club off Leicester Square and we only really went for the free drinks. Amechi seems to be on the guest list to everything, as does his partner in wine David, who also adheres, if that’s the correct word and it isn’t, to The Chap mentality by being utterly not of this era. Amechi, with his waxed moustache, and David, who looks like a bohemian Terry Thomas, are from 1934 and I too crave simpler times as you’ll know, so I liked them both instantly.
David and Amechi are the modern reincarnation of the rake. The cad. But essentially rake’s. Indeed, I found out later that they are party promoters, like Wade, and one of their glamorous evenings is indeed called Rakeshell. The term ‘rake’ derived from ‘rake’s hell’, a medieval term for someone so low that you’d have to rake hell to find anyone worse. Later, the aristocracy began to like the idea and the most depraved and drunkard began to describe themselves as rakes. A rake will spend all your money and take away your wife, but you’d still consider him a close friend because that’s what he does.
A rake will drink at the Grill Room of the Café Royal, and having left the rubbish Front party with a gift bag full of sweeties and condoms and moisturisers and the like, Wade, Aria and I headed there, again meeting Amechi and David. It’s a glorious room, quite fantastically ornate. It’s resplendent, that the word for it. And full of the beautiful movers and shakers of the London underground. That’s not to say they all work on the Tube, you know what I mean.
Amechi and David set about entrancing and therefore probably destroying women, and I hung about, fascinate that I’d lived in London for so long and never really knew all this existed. I was never part of a cool society.
It was the perfect tonic for the lost bag and I found myself not thinking about it for up to three minutes at a time. Then feeling guilty about forgetting about her. I mean it.
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