The Keys And The Bag

a parable (not about drugs)

I’m on tour if you’d like to come see me, tickets available here.

Just realised keys and bag is very cocaine-coded isn’t it. I’m not a cocaineman myself but I know it’s cocaine-coded because I listened to Charli XCX’s brat album last year while googling each lyric to understand the cultural references - for example ‘shall we do a little key shall we have a little line’. And (irrelevantly) ‘when someone is annoyed ‘the bank’s shut’ what does that imply’.*

*Apparently that they are financially unstable. A bit confusing because the bank being shut has no bearing on how much money you have in your account/whether you can use an ATM but fine fine Von Dutch is a banger.

ANYWAY. The parable. Which I pronounce the Greek way, of course and will be doing in third person so it’s more parabley and less a thing that happened to me.

Last week a woman lost her keys and her bag in one fell swoop. Her keys are always on a hook by the door, her bag is always on the bag hook with the coats (perhaps known as a coat and bag hook? Who’s to say) but one morning she went to find them, and they had gone.

The woman looked everywhere for these keys and this bag, while crying. She retraced her footsteps from the previous day (two cafes, still crying), checked all the usual suspects in the house (coat and bag hook and crying) and then started thinking outside the box (under the bed? under the dog’s bed? in the oven?) with increasing desperation (and crying).

Eventually time won out, as is its wont, and the woman had to leave because she was being paid to appear irreverent and amusing on a podcast. En route to said podcast, she looked out of the train window blackly thinking thoughts such as ‘what’s the point of me buying these trousers I’ve found on Vinted? I’ll only lose them’ in a similar tone to Eeyore, if Eeyore bought trousers and went on podcasts.*

*His podcast would be called Horsin Around and he’d start every episode by saying gloomily ‘I’m not a horse…I’m a donkey…I shouldn’t have called it that…but it’s too late now’.

Back to me crying all over the house. What an extreme reaction! You might think. It’s just a set of keys! You may say. Or, as the woman’s partner said: I’ll cut you a new set while you’re being irreverent and amusing on the podcast! But that wasn’t quite enough, because the woman was holding a secret.

You see, she used to lose everything. In 2011 she lost six phones. Too many times to count had she disembarked from a bus only to realise her phone had not disembarked with her. Once, a phone got trapped in the vestibule of a block of flats she was staying in, and she couldn’t get back in because she didn’t have a key, so left a note that said ‘please can somebody put this phone through the letterbox of Flat 14 for safekeeping’ and of course nobody did. Once, she dropped a phone into a trough of noodles at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet which isn’t relevant because she didn’t lose the phone, it was just covered in oil for a bit, but it still feels worth mentioning at this juncture (of the parable).

What I (the writer) is trying to get across, is that this woman had only once reached the expiry date on a debit card, and that was two years ago. She does not allow herself to take a reusable water bottle out of the house because the sheer number this woman was getting through became detrimental to the earth’s atmosphere.

Recently, though, she had changed. She had become very good at implementing systems to prevent her from losing things, much aided by the fact she doesn’t get drunk constantly like she did in her 20s and so is more able to do the Looking Over Your Shoulder When You Leave Public Transport trick. For most people this is not a trick, but it took the woman decades to master and now she is - as previously stated- changed. She is a New Woman.

The emblem, the totem, the symbol of this New Womanhood has become her housekeys. This is because she has not lost a set of housekeys in nearly ten years. The same keyrings- an S scrabble tile, a little engraving of her old dog she grew up with, a miniature version of a piece from that tile game Hive that her and her partner play on holiday until the woman’s competitiveness makes it ‘not fun’ and ‘hey maybe let’s got for a little walk by the sea until you’ve calmed down’ - remain on the keyring.

These keyrings act as evidence that this is a woman of fine deportment. A woman who is dependable, reliable and crucially not a mad buffoon. Because being a mad buffoon is all fun and games when monetised for amusing content, but it’s fucking hard trying to navigate ordinary life as one!!! The woman might say, because she’s passionate about the topic.

Picture the mad buffoon, for example, not understanding that you can’t put large things on top of small things in the fridge so the next time she opens the fridge , everything falls out, and this is constantly a surprise despite happening every day for 37 years.

Picture the mad buffoon discussing damp-proof options with a contractor and making notes to counteract her mad buffoonery - for she is a clever, self aware buffoon - before going to proudly read said notes out to her partner and realising the note says ‘stones?’ and nothing else.

Picture the mad buffoon losing an entire bag and set of keys with absolutely no idea how it happened.

Lo, a key-based gloom set in which the woman was concerned would remain for the rest of her days. She travelled back from quite frankly failing to be as irreverent and amusing as she should have done, because she was thinking about the water bottles. She was thinking about the time she threw her debit card into the Thames when getting it out of her purse too flamboyantly. She was thinking about how she was just a big joke and the keys proved that no matter how hard she tried, she would always be a big stupid joke who writes ‘stones?’ in her phone notes when the guy didn’t even reference the word ‘stone’ once, let alone multiple stones.

But wait!

While on her way back home, her partner messaged a picture of the lost bag and the lost keys! Where had he found them? Had she put them in the fridge on top of a much smaller object (aioli)? Had she woven the bag into the fabric of the bedroom carpet without realising? Had she put it in the shower like she did with her glasses case this morning?

No. Her partner had found the bag hung on the coat and bag hook she always hung it on, the keys nestled inside. He had found it in the first place the woman had looked. And also the second, third and fourth. The woman stared into space for about half an hour - easy to do because she was on quite a long train - wondering which was worse: being someone who loses things all the time or someone who, when trying to find something they’ve lost, apparently goes blind.

She kept staring at the picture of the bag on the hook thinking ‘that bag could not be more on that hook’ and ‘When I looked at the hook, what the juddering fuck did I see? Another bag? What were my eyes doing? Did my eyes jump out and roll around the floor for a bit? Or turn black like evil peoples’ eyes do in supernatural TV shows in the 2010s?’

Her partner did not say any of these things, he said: TRUST YOURSELF NEXT TIME!!!!!!!

It would be nice if that was the moral of the parable, but it’s not. Sometimes you can’t trust yourself, because sometimes you’re a weapons grade oaf.

It took about two days for the woman to feel remotely good about the fact that she’d never lost the keys and bag in the first place, because this was something that had happened before. Many, many times. And she was so fed up of the effort of following systems to avoid losing things, that the thought of having to put another system in to make sure her eyes weren’t rolling round the floor when looking for things she hadn’t even lost made her want to shriek like a crow and explode into a fine mist.

But she remembered that life is about constantly improving, learning and putting systems in place to help yourself. And that these systems do not make you stupid or a mad buffoon. And you don’t have to put these systems in place at all, it’s a choice, to try and make daily life a little bit easier.

Also, never make an object/action/possession/thing an emblem of anything. Because if you do, when something happens to that emblem, you have an incredibly over the top response that makes no sense to people who live with you because they haven’t realised this isn’t just a set of keys, but is in fact a beacon of light in the darkness of misplacing your dried mango mid-snack and finding it a day later in a pair of shoes you haven’t worn in years.

It’s just keys man!!!!

Which is, satisfyingly, a Charli XCX lyric (it’s not, I just wanted this ending to be satisfying). Oh and nobody is allowed to diagnose me with ADHD in the comments - we all know I have it pal. Everyone’s thinking it mate. I don’t need to be told again m’lord (that almost certainly is a Charli XCX lyric, from her first album Courtly Manners In Medieval Britain).

Goodbye x

Come and see me on tour for less parables/long winded anecdotes about keys and more jokes? I am also doing the fringe for a week in August with the same show too but may fanny about a bit, who knows.