Where have they gone?

 

Where have they gone? 

The decline in the left-hand members of the gardening glove community has been happening for quite some time. Finding a pair has become a mix and match affair and can look rather jolly and quite colourful but yesterday I could find no left-handers at all. They had all disappeared.

I keep buying pairs in a variety of patterns and colours, so that I can have a left-handed glove. I have been conscientious about storing them in partnerships, or so I thought, but now I have about ten right-handed gloves and none for my neglected left hand. I have even tried wearing a right-handed glove on my left hand, but it’s quite constricting and not at all comfortable.

I’m right-handed and my husband is left-handed, but we both have the same frustration with gloves. If there were any logic to it, I would expect my husband to have problems with right-handed gloves, but he doesn’t. It’s always the left-handed gloves that vanish.

I researched the possibility of buying only left-hand gloves, but that idea didn’t fly. One day I shall find the missing gloves, along with all the pencils and other things that mysteriously go astray. Meanwhile, I await the delivery of a few more pairs of gloves.

This phenomenon doesn’t occur with winter gloves, just the ones I need for gardening, although I do find that a similar thing happens with rubber gloves, the ones everyone calls ‘Marigolds’ even if they’re not that brand.

It’s always the left-hand gloves that develop a split that isn’t apparent until the glove is full of water or the hand is covered in whatever the glove was meant to thwart. It’s quite sinister. Is it the work of the Devil, perhaps, or mischievous spirits, like boggarts?

 

Where’s my cursor gone?

I suppose it’s par for the course at this busy time of year that things should go astray. You know how it is – you put something down, turn around to look for something else and when you go back for the first thing, it’s not there.  

In our house, however, things disappear all year round, busy times or not.

When we had children living at home we used to blame the poltergeist. That excuse began to lose its potency as each child in turn left the teenage years behind and moved out of the family home, later to form their own sprite-attracting units. We have young animals – maybe they attract mischievous fairies. Actually, I think they may be the boggarts – at least they display certain boggartly characteristics. Socks mysteriously disappear to be discovered at some future point in a dog basket or a flower pot or under a mat or in the garden. The same fate befalls gloves, shoes, bags, chocolate cake . . .

However, I really think I cannot blame a hobgoblin for the loss of my cursor. I suppose it could be gremlins, the poltergeists of the personal computer.   Gremlins and computers have a symbiotic relationship much like mistletoe and trees. The case of the cursor is very irritating, though; - one minute it’s there, the next it’s gone. Hunt as carefully as I might, I cannot discern its presence anywhere on my screen and so, frustrated, I close the lid of my laptop, reopen it and voilà, it reappears as if by magic.

The problem has been compounded and modified recently by the addition of a second screen. Mounted on a bracket, it can be swung out from the wall to give a larger, brighter display, ideal for editing photographs or viewing details, or researching several things at once. Now the cursor is plain to view on the bright screen, winking malevolently at me as I struggle to move it back to my laptop. The touch pad grows hot under my frantic fingers as I stroke it repeatedly, despite multiple blisters and friction burns. In desperation I unplug the additional display and the impish cursor leaps back into place. Restoring the second screen to continue my editing, or research or whatever foolhardy pursuit I have embarked upon, and lo and behold, the cursor has vaulted off my laptop once more.

So here I sit, like a manic organ grinder, opening and closing my laptop a hundred times an hour and unplugging and plugging in my alternative display, while my cursor plays hide and seek with me. I swear I can hear the tinkling laughter of a naughty fairy. I shan’t be clapping for Tinker Bell this year!