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This car problem is entirely my own fault (which makes it extra hard to bear), and it has nothing to do with wearing high heels (see the post below).

I drove back from work on Monday early in the afternoon, I walked to the post office and posted a parcel (a short journey of 200 metres there and back), let myself back into the house, had a cuppa, went into the studio, sat down, and worked for a couple of hours. Later that afternoon, my partner asked me for the car key.
Ah….

Now normally I’m very methodical about this part of car sharing and I religiously put the key on the allotted hook in the cupboard under the stairs as soon as I enter the house if I’ve been driving. In fact, if there were a religion based on car key replacement, I’d be out there on the fanatical wing of that church. The main reason for this fanaticism is that we only have one car key. One holy, divine and irreplaceable key. It’s normally She who loses the key and while I try to keep my trap shut and not ask idiot questions about places she might have failed to search, it’s usually discovered in her coat pocket or bag within sixty seconds of starting the search.

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But of course this time the key wasn’t in the place we hoped to find it, (which by some beautiful logical symmetry is always the best pace to put things) otherwise I wouldn’t be telling this story.

The usual ritual was followed, and it followed the time honoured pattern: The re-tracing of steps, real or imagined, was acted out, accompanied by tapping of likely and unlikely pockets, and the expected obvious questions about obvious places where the key might be lurking were asked. “Have you looked in your laptop bag?” “Are you sure you didn’t lock them in the car?” You must know the routine.

Long story short: A couple of days later, after exhausting every avenue of possibility and improbability, I thought that I’d ring the local police station in Reigate, Surrey, where we live, just in case some nice person had handed the key in. There are a lot of nice people in Reigate who are just the sort who hand in lost property to the police.
In fact Surrey is the county in Great Britain that has the lowest crime figures of any county, and Reigate seems to be the the town in Surrey that’s least troubled by crime.
The police here all look as though they could do with some exercise, if you know what I mean.

I walked to the police station, which was very quiet, entered the reception area and pressed a buzzer for attention. I was eventually greeted by a policewoman who, how can I put this - well, if I were a robber and I was hightailing it up Reigate High Street with a bag of stolen pies and looked over my shoulder to see who was giving chase, I’d be very happy to find that it was she; in fact I’d probably chuck a couple of the pies behind me to slow her even more - was in need of a bit of exercise.

You will be happy to learn that we are now approaching the point of this story… The policewoman placed a small yellow plastic crate filled with car keys onto the reception counter and instructed me to “look through that lot”. It was the sort of little crate that you might keep spare lightbulbs in. Not very sturdy, and most likely bought at extremely low price from a discount hardware shop.
She then left the reception area and left me alone with the keys, which made me start to wonder about the security implications of her action, what with me suddenly being able to help myself to other peoples’ property (in the unlikey but not impossible event that I could somehow locate it).

Staring at the crate filled me with a completely unexpected sadness.

There were probably sixty to seventy car keys fobs in that yellow plastic basket. Some had just one lonely key and others sported leather and plastic tabs with the car maker’s name embossed upon them. Many of the keyrings sported multiple bunches of keys, not just for cars, but doors, padlocks and windows. People had somehow lost not just their keys but their ability to get back into their lives and their houses too, and I knew full well from my recent hours and hours of futile, desperate searching what quasi-madness can be induced by the loss of something so familiar and necessary as a car key. Here was the antithetical and simultaneous mixture of grieving and hoping contained in my own search repeated sixty or seventy fold, right in front of me. I reminded myself that I was lucky in that I still had my house keys and could at least get back into my own home.

The thing that really gutted me though, was that there were so many bunches of keys that had engraved fobs with the owners telephone number clearly visible. Drivers had prudently planned against the day when they might accidentally lose their keys, and the fobs carried pathetic little pleas such as “If found, please call this number”, or “Reward for the return of these keys”. A few of the tags were provided by expensive car key loss insurance schemes. Yet all these keys were still in the cheap little crate and quite obviously no attempt had been made to reunite the marked ones with their owners. I guessed that like myself, other arrangements would have been made by now; new locks, new keys, and so on.

I didn’t find my key, but I did take comfort in the acts of kindness shown by the nice people of Reigate who had been taking the trouble to bring other people’s lost car keys into the police station, which was a cheering thought, tinged with some sourness by the inaction of the new guardians of the keys who nullified all that goodwill by failing to make any effort to re-unite them with their owners.

I pressed the buzzer to let the duty policewoman know that I was leaving, and asked in parting why the police had not at least phoned the owners of the keys whose fobs had phone numbers. She replied “We ain’t got time, love.”

Perhaps it would be a good job to give to the more trusted people among those who are doing community service instead of a jail sentence. If there are any such (forced) community service people in Reigate, that is.