The Outlaws #3 - Ticket to Ride

Saturday evening had been marred by the discovery that, sometime during the day, Shirley had mislaid her passport. By the time she realised it was too late to do anything about it apart from the obvious search of the house, and yesterday we were fully engaged with the family reunion, so today we swung into action. The first part of the day was taken up with phone calls - retracing the steps of their walk into Chorlton on Saturday. We called the bank and the bus company to discover whether the missing passport had been handed in. It was a "no" at the bank, when we finally got to talk to the branch, and the story was the same with the bus (if a little more tortuous in the route to the right person, given that we started off with the wrong bus company, who didn't admit until we were on the third phone call that they didn't run a #22 service).

Having learned from the emergency line to the embassy in Ottawa (all other lines being closed for Canadian thanksgiving!) that we needed a police report to engage the next part of the process, we headed off to the police station, where I spent a happy half-hour twiddling my thumbs and rueing the fact that I didn't think to bring a newspaper or the latest book club book with which to while away the minutes. I entertained myself cleaning the gunk from around the lenses on my glasses, moving the car around the car park (there were no free spaces when we arrived, then the single disabled space became free, so I parked in it temporarily until the space beside it was vacated), and reading the map book for the best route to Bakewell (there are three!) followed by an aerial examination of the roads around Westminster. I was saved from moving on to plucking ear hairs by the reappearance of Nikki and her Mum, who had been the last in the queue behind a bail signee and a couple of others.

By this time it was 12.30 and Nikki declared she wanted to be back from Bakewell by 3pm to make sure her step-Dad was still within his bounded universe. I pointed out that this would give them about enough time in Bakewell to draw breath, maybe two, and so they abandoned the idea and went to the Trafford Centre instead.

I met up with them in the pub later and engaged in a riveting conversation with one of the locals about how you couldn't get anything but Irish music played in the pub nowadays and that if he decided to set up an English themed pub in Dublin and play nothing but Cliff Richard and the Stones they'd tell him to "feck off." About halfway through his seventh retelling of this yarn I was rescued by his sudden need to get up and walk over to the next table, presumably to explain to the people sitting there how you couldn't get anything but Irish music played in the pub nowadays and that if...

Anyway it was at that point that Shirley showed me her copy of the lost property report the police had filled in. The first item on the form was marked "Full name of Loser:"

You have to laugh.