Wandering passport
In November 2023, my wife and I took a winter sun trip to the island of Tenerife with a group of friends as a break from cold, wet northern England. We had a lovely room in a nice hotel in bustling Los Christianos. We were on the third floor and the room felt very secure, so we didn’t bother renting a safe. Passports were tucked away out of sight in the bedroom, money was in money belts, all felt good security wise.
One morning, my wife Nicky, who is an early riser, woke me in a panic. She couldn’t find her passport despite having put it safely away in the bedroom and having checked it the night before. She does tend to stress about losing things, but I was fairly relaxed about it as we had been the only ones in the room, and I was sure it would soon turn up. As time went on though, Nicky became more and more agitated and worried. I should say that I follow Fortean Times and was enjoying reading It Happened to Me, Book 2, on Kindle while we were away. The evening before I’d been reading the section entitled ‘Pixilation’, where people would inexplicably lose things, and having asked out loud for them to be returned, would miraculously then find them again, usually in plain sight. I should also say at this point, that my wife is very practical – “when you’re dead you’re dead” – no spirits, ghosts, UFOs or anything else of that sort exist in her world.
As Nicky’s meltdown continued and the passport still hadn’t been found, I thought I’d try a little experiment. I felt a bit self-conscious about it as I knew Nicky would think I wasn’t taking this crisis seriously, so I stepped into the bathroom, shut the door and said out loud: “Could we have the passport back please?”. Within a second, I heard “Found it” from outside. Nicky had found her passport inside the book she had been reading all morning. Had she absent-mindedly removed the passport from its safe place and put it in the book she was reading, then forgotten about it, then found it again just as I secretly asked for it back from the bathroom? Maybe. Anyway, I went back to the bathroom and quietly said, “Thanks for the passport”. Steve Watt
Hexham, Northumberland