Cold borrowers?

I like scarves.

At school, I wear a shirt, tie, sports jacket, and trousers. In summer, the sports jacket is linen, in winter it is tweed. In autumn and winter, I wear a scarf.

I like scarves. I like long scarves. I like the sort of scarves that I can fold in half and then put the two ends through the loop and pull snugly around my neck. Or the sort of scarf that I can loop around my neck and have the two ends still at waist length.

It was such a preference that caused me disappointment in the spring – one of my favourite scarves was lost.

One of the students in school noticed it was no longer among the half a dozen that I wear. ‘Where’s the stripey scarf you used to wear, sir?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I must have left it in one of those classrooms.’

Normally, going into a warm room, I would take off my scarf and hang it over the back of the chair at the teacher’s desk. I rarely sit down during a lesson, so it is not in the way.

There had been three or four times previously when I had returned to rooms to recover scarves, (a small fraction of the times that I had returned to recover my external hard drive which contains my life’s work and without which I would be lost).

The loss of the scarf was annoying. I checked each of the rooms in which I had taught, I checked every corner of the staff room, I checked rooms into which I had not been, lest someone had picked it up to return it and had then put it down again.

The scarf was nowhere to be found. I concluded that either someone had taken it, or, more likely, it had been thrown away.

There were thoughts about buying a replacement. The cost of energy might mean scarves become indoor as well as outdoor wear.

Returning from a summer in England on Tuesday evening, I began unpacking my bags.

At the bottom of the chest of drawers, there is a drawer into which I put stuff that is rarely, if ever, worn. I opened it to throw in a couple of pairs of shorts not worn in years that had been lying in a wardrobe in Somerset. There was a moment of delight – there, neatly folded, was my scarf.

How the scarf came to be in a drawer of rarely worn garments, I have no idea. I have no recall of putting it there. All of my scarves are together in a cupboard, there is no reason why I would have opened the drawer and put the scarf in it.

Recalling the children’s story,  my father would have said it was the borrowers.

This entry was posted in Uncategorised. Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to Cold borrowers?

  1. Chris says:

    As a matter of sartorial deportment, please confirm there are leather patches on the elbows of the tweed jacket.

    Little things mean a lot.

  2. James Higham says:

    I’ve a long brown and cream coloured woollen scarf and once had a white silk scarf. They do become part of you and define you.

    • Ian says:

      You’re right, but it was not until the boy commented that the stripey scarf was missing, that it occurred to me that they noticed.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *