Personal items

I’m getting out at the next stop and there’s that announcement again, reminding me to take all my personal items with me when I leave the train. So all I have to do now is decide which are my impersonal items, so that I can leave them behind. Obviously, I won’t take the half-eaten brie-and-rocket sandwich on rye, which was disappointingly impersonal. And I can leave the umbrella, as we’ve never been close. Also my left shoe which pinches. The right one has always been my favourite.

However, I will certainly keep this carriage clock (believed to date back to the second half of the 18th century) as a personal item. I am taking it to be assessed by one of the experts at a recording of Antiques

Roadshow. I’ve been rehearsing my lines. ‘I purchased this item at a car boot sale in 1982,’ I will say. You have to use genteel words such as ‘purchase’ and ‘item’; otherwise, people might think you were only interested in the money. They get a lot of carriage clocks; so the expert will certainly not consider it to be an unexpected item. That would also suggest that it was any old thing picked up at Tesco.

I suppose a truly unexpected item found in a bagging area would be society chiropodist Rupert Thackeray and Mimi Tolstoy, star of TV’S Celebrity

Lawnmower Races. The gossip columns revealed that these two were an item. Of course, you are more likely to spot them coming out of a nightclub in the early hours than hanging around at a supermarket checkout.

I guess Mimi fell for Rupert because he is such a romantic chiropodist. I believe he won her over when he tweeted, ‘How do I love thee? Let me itemise the ways.’

Oh dear. The train is pulling out of the station. I missed my stop. Now I’m going to have to keep my personal items with me at all times. OLIVER PRITCHETT