I left a bag with everything in it on platform three at York station. Imagine my disappointment. I was on a direct train to London, finishing the puzzle I’d been doing on my phone as I’d boarded the train, so absorbed that I’d left half my luggage – the important half – behind. My Sunday was in tatters.
I’d had such a nice day planned – a nice lunchtime train journey, after a nice morning with family and friends in York, leaving plenty of time to get home to watch the England match. But it wasn’t to be. It rarely is. For this is my special power – common to many people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – forever finding ways of turning leisure time, in this case a relaxing afternoon, into a nerve-shredding orgy of panic.
I did a lot of things all at once. I slapped myself around the head several times quite hard, uttering the foulest language as I did so. I found an 0800 number for York station, which wasn’t for York station but for Northern Rail, and there were no humans on the end of it, only unhelpful options. And then the signal went anyway. I called my brother-in-law, who dropped everything and went racing to the station. I found the train manager, who had a secret number for the station, and eventually got hold of someone to seek my bag. With heart rate soaring, blood pressure doubtless dangerously high and a vein pulsing on my temple, I awaited news.
The train manager reappeared. The bag had been located. I resisted the temptation to kiss him on the lips. With my brother-in-law closing in on the station, I started formulating a plan. As one of Britain’s leading idiots, who’s done this kind of thing a million times, I’m very good at quickly reformulating carefully laid plans. I’ve had to be.
I checked train times back north from King’s Cross, wondering if I could persuade my brother-in-law to meet me halfway – Peterborough? Newark? – hand over the prodigal bag, find a pub, and watch the football there.
At which point, from deep in the recesses of my addled mind, came a lightbulb moment. That morning I’d met a friend whose son had mentioned he was getting the train after mine to London, which was leaving in five minutes’ time. I begged him to find my brother-in-law, who had by now retrieved the bag from the information desk and could give it to him to convey to me at King’s Cross on the very next train. It worked. The bag was on its way, only half an hour behind me. Truly, you are better off being lucky than clever.
It was a beautiful thing. What a story. What a narrative arc. I could almost see the credits rolling, cast in order of appearance, with thanks to, etc, etc. I should make a short film. Take it to Cannes. Win an award. Un Film d’un Idiot.
Seriously, I sometimes pity competent people. They miss out on these thrills and spills. The horror, the terror that the error cannot be resolved, the frantic rearguard action, the joy of resolution. Redemption. Euphoria. I felt nothing less than euphoria. To my lasting shame, with barely a thought for all the people I’d put out, I spent the remainder of that journey luxuriating in my triumph. How energised I now felt. So much happier than if I’d not been stupid enough to leave my bag with everything in it on platform three at York station.
As Tennyson – a man who knew a self-inflicted disaster when he saw one – might have put it, ’tis better to have lost a bag and found it again than never to have lost the bloody thing in the first place.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
