You may have been thinking that you’ve not heard much from me of late. Well you’d be right. The truth of the matter is that all my birthdays recently came at once. By ‘birthdays’ I mean of course ‘nightmares’: concurrent work projects colliding with a brief sojourn to America, combined with the matter of the loft. Oh boy, the loft.
We’ve all seen The Money Pit. We all know that when a builder says something will take two weeks, it’s a euphemism for something far more ugly. In my case, it’s now six weeks since they asked me to vacate my property for a fortnight “or so”, and I’m getting that awkward feeling that what they actually want with my gaff is squatters’ rights.
On top of this is the tedium that comes with fitting out. Last week I spent six hours looking at radiators and another hour and a half looking at radiator valves. That’s a day’s work lost to two poxy square metres of wall, and we haven’t even got to the bathroom suite yet. And don't start me on the wardrobe.
There's also the matter of my comping book, which I have been going back to in any spare moment I can grab. If I can manage to get the e-book out in the world by the end of this month, you guys will have witnessed a bona fide miracle, but more on that in due course. The short of the matter is that I have had almost no time for comping, full stop, and given the rate that I’m haemorrhaging cash, I really need to start winning stuff pronto. So if you see any comps for 96 litres of paint and an experienced decorator, do let me know.
The worst thing about my holiday was that not everything returned with me. Oh, I had the essentials, like socks, jocks and a broadly adequate number of children, but not my black holdall.
The holdall in question contained a whole bunch of things, such as toiletries, dominoes and sunglasses, to name but a few. There was also the matter of the 400 cigarettes.
For the record, I don’t smoke - I’d just bought them for my hopeless addict of a mate. Whether that made the loss worse, I couldn’t say. But I was steaming.
You see, I remember wearing the bag; my wife watched me fasten the shoulder strap onto it once I’d retrieved it from the carousel; and I recall exiting the terminal and slinging a holdall into the back of the taxi.
I also know that once we’d reached home, our eyes were on the children as the cabbie emptied his boot, so it took a couple of minutes to notice the absence of the bag, by which time he was well on the road.
My wife called the cab firm right away, but the casual disdain with which they denied everything hardly inspired confidence. Nevertheless, my wife took them at their word and returned to the airport.
The bag had not been seen.
This struck me as odd, because if I saw an unattended bag languishing in an airport, I’d be straight onto security. But no.
So we called the taxi company again. This time they dropped any pretence of sympathy and said, quite bullishly, that we’d just have to speak to the police.
So we did. Not with any expectation that they would solve the mystery, you understand, but the motions are prescribed and through them one must go.
Now, there are of course two sides to every story. To this end, the officer called the taxi firm for their statement. They refused to provide one - not unless the investigating officer turned up in person. Subsequent to this, their extraordinary cooperation was duly noted by the police, who, when they next updated us on the sorry situation, described the company as “obstructive”.
It all stank, but what could we do? Their story was consistent, there was no CCTV footage of me loading the car, and still no one in the airport’s lost property department had seen anything. The only remaining course of action was to file the insurance claim.
As anyone who has ever filed a claim will know, the phone calls last hours; the paperwork longer. The receipt hunt alone can turn nuns into nihilists. Finally, destiny brings you to the one absolute truth: all life is futile.
For me, that process took a couple of weeks, spread around the heaps and heaps of work that arrived while I was on leave. And then, just ten minutes from sealing the envelope, my phone rang. It was the airport. They had found my luggage in the carousel area, and thanks to the left hand eventually talking to the right, decided to contact me.
Flabbergasted was definitely the word. That, and emotional. When the very helpful chap at the other end offered to courier it to me - at no cost - my eyes moistened and my voice cracked.
Still, a bird in the hand and all that. I resolved not to get too excited until I got my paws back on the bag - surely there had to be some mistake?
But no: by lunchtime the next day, I was hugging the holdall. As you can imagine, I felt like a bona fide winner, so it seemed only right to set up the camera for my first unboxing video of the month. The sense of wonder, I think, is palpable.
I know we were all exhausted when we landed (getting up at 2 am in order to fly with children seldom gets the best out of people), but when a story has more fishy bits than Grimsby Docks, no one in their right mind expects a happy ending.
Sure, I’d love to know how come my bag was also returned with someone else’s shoulder strap, but in the grand scheme of things, I’m still a winner, right?
For most compers, prize-winning is the most tangible form of good fortune, but it's important to recognise - and own - the good luck in all aspects of your life. To this end, I'm expanding my scribbles to include stories celebrating luck more generally. If you've got any you'd care to share, please add them to the comments below!
Last week was extraordinary. My son lost his first tooth and he came home from school delighted that he was going to get a fiver. He was convinced about this fiver. No matter what we said to suggest that five pounds might not be on the cards, he wouldn’t have it. So I wrote him a letter from the Tooth Fairy, snapped it quickly, and popped it on Facebook to give my family a laugh.
A week later, my post had had 4000 shares. Heart FM had also got on it and posted the letter on their various local Facebook pages, so it had a few thousand more shares too. As Andy Warhol would no doubt have said, everyone goes viral once.
Anyway, my comping went out the window as I attempted to replicate the virality on Twitter by making an account for the Tooth Fairy. Truthfully, the endeavour met with limited success; however, it did align with one of my resolutions for this year: familiarising myself with Tweetdeck. I make no claim to have got it licked, but I’m certainly going to be better prepared for the next Twitter party.
The main thing I’ve learned from this experience is that when the time arrives for you to go viral, broadcasters and media companies will be in touch. They will ask to share your content - and promise to credit you. You will be flattered. Your content will spread farther and wider. However, you won’t see how far and how wide it has gone, because all those likes and shares will accrue to the media company, extending their “reach” - in other words, their currency with their advertisers. If reach is the sort of thing you need, then think carefully about your wording when you grant permission.
I had no way of monetising my Facebook post, so the matter was academic. My only condition was that Heart also tweeted a message about oral hygiene - which they did!
How does this relate to comping? Simple: I just wish I’d used the letter as a competition entry before posting it online - now that everyone’s seen it, I can’t imagine it has any comping currency at all!
EDIT: A company has just offered my lads a generous bunch of kit to encourage them to maintain good toothbrushing habits, so I'm counting that as a win! I'll tell you more about that soon...
