Losing it

I've lost my watch. It wasn't a very expensive one, just a silver and blue Fossil that I only discovered had luminous hands a year after I bought it, but it was my watch. I'm not going to go into some cod-Full Metal Jacket routine about how there are many watches like this one, and how without my watch I am useless, etc.

For a start, I'm not a trainee in the US Army, and even if I were, I doubt beating people to death with a mass-produced timepiece was ever part of basic training. I fully accept I may be wrong in this, but please don't castigate me too violently for this momentary slip. Tread gently on my face, for you tread upon, well, my face.¹

But it is annoying that I should lose it now, if only because I'd only just had it repaired. Twice.

About a month ago, friends visited and I drank two pints (although I realised when I sobered up the next day that I'd actually had six), and I woke the next day to find my watchstrap in two pieces. I put it on the shelf and did nothing about it, hoping in six months it would right itself.

It didn't, but after we moved, I think my girlfriend tired of my terrible timekeeping, and seeing a helpful man with a miniature hammer and a set of tools over the road from our new apartment, took the watch to be fixed.

And then two days later, when we realised that my muscular wrist had snapped two pins, not one, and neither of them had regrown, we went back across the road and the man did his stuff with his miniature hammer again.

For two whole days I walked around with my shiny old watch, and then today it was gone, vanished probably into the depths of California Fitness Wan Chai and never to be seen again. They might say nice things about your t-shirt, but that's little help when you've lost your prized chronometer.

So I stumbled around, timelessly, all day, saddened by my loss, and then went home to post my PCCW carbon paper termination slip. Only to find the envelope flap didn't have enough glue to stick down properly, and as well as having lost my watch I'd also lost my roll of sticky tape.²

I careered around the room in a rage, finding empty box of tape after empty box of tape, but none of the magical sticky stuff itself. Until wonder of wonders, I found my watch, stuffed under a shelf from last night. It wasn't in the lost property of the gym after all.
But still no tape, and in the next five minutes I managed to lose the key to our mailbox as well, having moved it away from where Tottoro was looking after it and then putting it down somewhere forgettable.

Not much of an excitement, because eventually after I'd stormed around the flat for another ten minutes, I found it in clear view once more. But losing so many items in such a small space is ridiculous. I'd tape all my possessions to myself to keep them safe.

If only I could find the tape.

¹ Yeats this most certainly is not.
² At this point you might want to imagine a dramatic pause. And some incoherent shouting.