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.

Coping with loss

As I walked away from where the taxi had dropped me, and as it drove away, I suddenly realised that I was bereft of my favourite Fidel Castro cap. I was struck with a bleak and desolating sadness. That hat had been my faithful companion since Alpe d'Huez in the summer of 2005; thereafter it had kept the sun out of my eyes without lowering me to the level of a man who would wear a baseball cap. It had endured having badges attached to it, being washed with a selection of filthy underpants, and five years of perspiration.