I’ve just travelled around the world and back living out of a suitcase and trying to sleep in six different places including on a swaying airbus with 500 other people squeezed into seats the size of a baby’s highchair and I didn’t lose a thing, except for my sanity a couple of times.
Then I get back to Australia and leave my life in an Uber bound for north Coburg.
When I say my life — I mean a tiny leather wallet with a picture of my two children as babies, a 1991 Fleet St Press Card and a faded sepia photo of my three siblings taken long before I was born.
The wallet also contained my bank card, driver’s licence, senior’s card, Flybuys card, and Diggers Club membership card.
But they aren’t my life.
They’re just replaceable tokens of my life.
Such is the whirling dervish of international travel that when it all stops and your body is 11 hours behind your mind, you do careless things like leave your wallet on the back seat of an Uber taxi.
I didn’t realise until the next day when it came time to pay for another month’s supply of life-support coffee beans in Fryers St.
I reached inside my shoulder bag and my chest collapsed into an empty bowl when I realised my wallet wasn’t there.
The next three days and nights were a sleepless blur of self-flagellation, Uber driver tracking and philosophical inquiry into the core morality of the ordinary human.
My little wallet became a lightning rod for all that is good and bad in the world.
What would you do if you found a wallet on the back seat of a taxi?
This wasn’t the first time I’d asked myself these questions.
At 3am one day this week, when my mind was still walking the streets on a freezing London afternoon, I remembered leaving the ignition keys in my motorbike outside my flat 40 years ago in Tooting.
Of course, the next day my precious Kawasaki was gone, proving the world is essentially a bad place and everyone is on the make.
For three months I rode around on a company machine watching for anything green on two wheels.
Then, one bright summer day I was riding around Trafalgar Square when I spotted a familiar green machine stopped at lights.
I snaked my way up to it and sat beside it, trying not too hard to stare.
Yep, it was my bike, with a straight-backed swaggering rider and a pillion passenger hanging on to the rear seat bar.
I followed it all the way to the outer city suburb of Hornsey, where they climbed off and walked into a nearby café.
I spent five frantic minutes riding up and down Hornsey High St waiting for a cop car.
When one rolled around a corner, I flagged it down and the cops dragged the two miscreants out of the café and arrested them because they had form and were dumb enough to ride a stolen motorbike across the crowded city on a sunny afternoon.
So, I got my bike back and the balance of the universe was restored from darkness to light.
It was a good place again, full of decent, helpful people.
And so, my little brown wallet, plain and pragmatic, became a talisman of hope or despair.
It really was absurd, if not wrong, of me to invest such emotion and power in a single portable object.
But we humans are, at heart, not completely rational beings.
So, when it was found and returned to me by the decent Uber driver, it came as no real surprise.
Despite the algorithm that tracks us, there is still a little unpredictable magic in the world.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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