I owe First Bus an apology. I also owe my wife one. Neither apology needs to be extravagant, particularly in the case of First Bus, whose lost-property system remains quite remarkably useless, but the evidence has developed in an unfortunate direction.
I dropped the Virago at the repair shop on a Wednesday, travelling home by First Bus. I then thought no more about the helmet because I had no motorcycle to ride. It was only the following Wednesday, with the garage likely to ring at any moment to say the bike was ready, that I went looking for it.
It wasn't there. Or, more accurately, it wasn't anywhere I thought it ought to be. Since the last time I remembered having it was on the journey home from the garage, the obvious conclusion was that I had left it on the bus. Thus began my encounter with First Bus lost property. The online form didn't work properly, the kiosk was closed and the telephone numbers led nowhere useful. I became increasingly convinced that somewhere within the First Bus empire was a perfectly good motorcycle helmet which I had very little prospect of recovering.
Suspicion also moved closer to home. My wife must have moved it. This was entirely plausible because I knew perfectly well that I hadn't. I had looked in all the sensible places and it wasn't there, so somebody else had obviously interfered with the natural order of things.
On the Thursday we went away for a few days in the Peak District, which necessarily suspended the investigation. On Friday, inevitably, the garage rang to say the Virago was ready. We returned on Sunday and the search resumed. By Monday I actually needed a helmet because I had to collect the bike. I still had the old open-face helmet from the Mobylette, so I could use that if necessary, but I was beginning to contemplate buying another.
And then I found it.
It was in the footwell of the ride-on mower at the top of the garden. Not even the ride-on mower I normally use. The other one.
At which point the entire mystery reconstructed itself. I had evidently come home from dropping off the bike, gone up the garden and, before going into the house, decided to mow the lawn. I chose my preferred ride-on mower but still had a motorcycle helmet in my hand, so I put it temporarily in the footwell of the other mower while I got on with the job.
There was absolutely nothing irrational about any of this. It was a perfectly sensible place to put a helmet for half an hour. The difficulty was that I subsequently forgot the half-hour had ever happened. The helmet then sat there for twelve days while I forgot about it for seven, spent several more investigating First Bus, accused my wife of moving it, went to the Peak District and began contemplating the purchase of a replacement.
The particularly irritating part is that my investigation of First Bus had uncovered a genuine organisational failure. Their lost-property arrangements really were dreadful. I had, in effect, conducted a fairly thorough stress test of the system using an item of property they had never lost, never found and, as far as I can reconstruct events, had never even carried.
I had been certain the helmet had been on the bus because that was the last place I remembered having it. When First Bus proved incapable of telling me anything useful, that seemed to reinforce the theory. When it wasn't anywhere at home, my wife became the alternative explanation. At no stage did it occur to me that the unreliable witness in the investigation was me.
So First Bus is acquitted of losing my helmet, although not of having a lost-property system which would probably have prevented me recovering it had I actually lost it. My wife is acquitted without reservation.
And I recovered the helmet just in time to collect the motorcycle, having spent several days looking for something that had spent the entire twelve days sitting peacefully in the footwell of my second-choice ride-on mower at the top of the garden.
Luckily, the lean-to housing the mower was rainproof.
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