BEACHCOMBER 105 YEARS OLD AND STILL IN THE RIGHT PLACE...

FOOD and energy prices, inflation and Covid rates are not the only things that have been rising dramatically. I have spotted another increase affecting us that is much worse than all those: the number of people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

According to a database of British newspapers, the phrase “in the wrong place at the wrong time” appeared in the press 117 times during the first 100 days of this year, compared with only 39 in the same period last year.

I immediately called Sir Untymleigh Wrongplace at the Ministry of Timetables to ask how he explained this 200 per cent increase. “You are asking the wrong question,” he said, “and, if I may say so, you are asking it at the wrong time, but I am here now, which is the right place, so I shall try to give you a proper overview of the situation.

“Many people,” he went on, “make the erroneous assumption that being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a bad thing, but this is by no means necessarily the case.

“If you arrive too early at the wrong place, then you have a fair chance of heading to the right place and getting there on time. Of if you are in the wrong place but late, there is a chance that you have already been to the right place at the right time and accomplished whatever you meant to do there. “However, if you are in the wrong place at the right time for being somewhere else, then you are scuppered.” “I understand that,” I said, “but all the same, 117 instances in 100 days of being in the wrong place at the wrong time seems to me to be rather extravagant. On average, that’s more than one misrouting and mistiming every day.”

“But that’s exactly the increase we’ve been aiming for,” Sir Untymleigh told me. “The more people go to the wrong place at the wrong time, the greater their chance of meeting some other unfortunate who has done exactly the same thing, ending up in the same place at the same time.

“They can then hold the original meeting at the new venue and the new time, or at least work out together where they should be and whether they can get there in time.”

I had plenty of other questions I wanted to put to him, but he remembered that he should have been somewhere else and he rushed off to find out where and when.