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?

No good samaritan badge for me.

Despite the daylight robbery at the show, I have decided that I won't move to the city in search of a crime free life, but will stay on my hillside and instead live a carrot free life. (In addition it is a neighbouring village show this weekend and I am going to go with my swag bag and see if there is anything as fine as my entries that I might purloin for myself......)

A strange thing happened while I was in London this week. I was driving a friend home to her house in Shepherds Bush on Sunday night. The sky was unnaturally dark as huge thunderheads had gathered above us. Every now and then lightning flickered around us and I was looking forward to getting back to said house for a large glass of wine and some catching up. We were travelling along behind a car which suddenly, with no warning and no recognisable reason turned hard right. Straight into a bollard and a set of pedestrian lights which imploded all over the street.

Now if I saw something like that happen here I would

a) be astonished that we suddenly had actual bollards and pedestrian lights
b) stop to see what I could do to help.

But this was London. As we sat with our mouths open in stunned amazement, the driver's door opened and the driver emerged. He grinned in a challenging way at the traffic building up behind him and seemed to think that totalling his car (which he assuredly had) was the best thing that had happened to him all day. Any thoughts I had had of leaping out of the car and practising my first aid fled. I put the car back into gear, manouvered round him and left the scene.

This decision is niggling at me. I left because the whole situation was bizarre, erratic and faintly threatening - the only reason to have swerved into a traffic light and then laugh about it struck me as being because he was drunk or high as a kite and I didn't want to get mixed up in it. I also rather cravenly felt that there were plenty of other people who could deal with the aftermath. I mean the driver wasn't carrying his limbs or acting remotely like somebody off Holby City but equally I didn't check how anyone else in the car was, or for that matter if there was anyone else in the car. I just fled.

Although it was probably a harmless decision in the overall scheme of things I know that I would have reacted totally differently if the accident happened on a country road. Here it would feel instinctive to help regardless, not just for me but for the majority of the locals. (There are a couple of curmudgeonly farmers who might cheer with joy at the scene of an accident but they put mantraps at the bottom of the chimney for father Christmas). That urge to stop and help probably explains why every minor incident ends with most of the village gathered around offering help, advice, prize winning jam and strong drink.

I lived in London for years and during all that time I never felt unsafe or particularly threatened, even when somebody broke through the front door with a knife (he was a bit of an idiot actually). But five years of living away from the seething mass of people that makes up London has made it all seem overwhelming and aggressive. I can't decide if the fact that I felt afraid was a sign of good sense, or a newly developed rural narrow mindedness.

It doesn't change the fact that I didn't choose to help but instead I quite literally crossed to the other side of the street and moved on. Hence, no good samaritan merit badge for me.