WHERE’S THAT KEY?

Where’s that key? Where’s that mobile? Where’s that torch? Where’s that stubby pencil? At the back of the sofa? I turn over the cushions. No Only a one-pound coin. On a bookshelf between two books? No! Only a greetings card used as a bookmark. Perhaps it’s fallen into that empty vase. It bugs me. I must know where it is. Once it happens it’s happenstance, twice is coincidence, three time is enemy action.

We’re like Palmerston. One of the things that bugged him was the Schleswig-Holstein question. It seemed important at the time.

Palmerston famously said that only three people had ever understood the Schleswig-Holstein business – the Prince Consort (and he was dead), a German professor (who had gone mad) and he himself (i.e. Palmerston) who once had understood it but had forgotten all about it.

As far as missing things like documents are concerned, we can well do without many of them. Bureaucrats feed on them. They get initialled and are never seen again. That doesn’t matter when it’s meals we can’t remember. They do their job and forget whether they were a salad or a casserole.

But some missing items are far from trivial. Keys are notorious. They get cut and nobody knows who pockets them. A bunch of keys on a ring are like puppies in a cardboard-box. You can’t tell one from another. But only one key fits the lock and time is short.

It doesn’t help to worry. And Bathsheba’s policy as you remember from ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ of key and Bible is not much better. The Bible is not a magic book and prayer is not just a way of solving trivial problems. The Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount are more concerned with some of the big decisions in life.

Even then somebody will point out that what we call the New Testament is not the only worthwhile element from those days. The Dead Sea Scrolls had a community and a library. Before they were discovered there were documents abundant in the Jewish tradition. Doubtless some of those went missing. In the nature of things it became necessary to have a cut-off between the NT and everything else.

But I’m still looking at the back of that sofa.

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