Dear reader

This issue is put together at the end of December, and the final Monday of last year got off to a bad start. My cellphone disappeared. It was definitely lying next to my bed when my alarm clock went off early that morning, but by eight o’clock it was nowhere to be found. And I had yet to set foot out of the house.

As always, the phone’s sound was off because I’d had enough of the constant ping-ping-pinging.

I searched high and low, but to no avail. I even looked in the fridge, and checked the shelf in the shower. Maybe I was still half asleep and had the phone in my hand when I turned on the tap?

Early that morning, I’d put on a load of washing as it was also my domestic helper Margaret’s last day before going home to Molteno. As the washing machine started to spin, I suddenly had an alarming thought: what if my cellphone had ended up in the machine with the bedding?! I quickly drained it, diligently searching through the bundle of sodden sheets and towels, but luckily found only soapsuds (and the remnants of a till slip, of course).

Margaret, who had meanwhile arrived, was up to her elbows in the Tupperware drawer. Andrew, our art director, searched among the crockery and coffee beans. In vain.

I have an electric blanket on my bed, with those pesky strings that tie under the mattress – which had also since been tipped up, but no luck. And Margaret doggedly kept on dialling, even though I’d explained to her that the sound was off – but she’s not easily deterred.

Just before I had to leave for an appointment, Margaret announced, her cellphone clutched to her ear, that my phone was still ringing – a good sign that it had not (yet) drowned in the washing machine. If there was still life, there was hope. And then, unbelievably, through the electric blanket shone a dim light. My phone! With the headphones in a tangled mess and plugged into its rear end.

Now I ask you: how is it possible that it ended up under that tightly tied blanket? When I last looked, it was on the bedside table and the bed was completely covered with a fitted sheet over the electric blanket!

Plus, how did the headphones get so tangled? Seamen have to go to naval college to learn how to tie knots like that but here, all on their own, the earphones had become a tangled mass that even the most adept weaver bird would battle to achieve with its nest. It’s one of life’s little (and big?) mysteries. Bring it on 2022, we’re ready for you. And for all those seemingly inexplicable occurrences…