Anyone seen my acorn?

You know how all of us have a list of things we wish were different about ourselves? A closer resemblance to Angelina Jolie rather than Angela Lansbury, the ability to speak all languagues with fluency and grace, to remember the punch lines of jokes, and always have great hair. The list goes on. Well, I'm not going to aim that high. I just want to change one thing today. That one thing? My terrible habit of writing vital phone messages down on ridiculous bits of paper that I can never find again.

I have two particuarly important phone messages that I wrote down last week on something handy that was lying around, a bit of cheese, a small acorn - a small acorn which I now cannot find. I expect the squirrel followed the cat into the house and filed it for the winter. But I am left feeling like a fool for not tattooing the message onto my arm and painting it on the wall so that I couldn't lose it.

It seems I am not to be trusted with verbal messages passed telephonically. I've tried to improve. I have a pad that I attempt to always write the message in, but sometimes I can't find the pad when I'm on the phone, and sometimes I write the message in there but not in full so that I don't recognise it as the vital information it is when I return to it. So instead of saying in the message - Roger the Bank Manager says don't spend any money or we will shoot you at dawn, my message might read - Roger Pistols at Dawn. Now, at the time I will think that I shall remember all the pertinent facts associated with such a gripping title. But actually two days later I can't remember what the bank managers minion was called and so the name Roger means nothing to me as I flick through the message book. I will wonder in passing if it is a book title that somebody recommended to me, or a duel challenge that I have forgotten about. You see the dilemma.

I am now faced with ringing people up and asking them to repeat their message. This makes me look like an idiot, which arguably I am, and wastes time. Typically, as they answer the telephone I will find said piece of cheese, acorn or cryptic message and then have to pretend that I rang for a different reason entirely. Even worse, sometimes I can't ring them up because the thing I am looking for is their telephone number. Anyone seen an acorn with a telephone number and a duel challenge on it?