Lost and Found

Oooh kids eh?,.......the old losing things in the training changing rooms trick.


We are parents in the throes of being sucker punched by the teenager.


I may come across as untrustworthy of my offspring which is probably a bad thing, but in my reality it says guilty until proven that it was me who placed the incriminating evidence in your pocket ~"old school training".


He ~ the Teenager ~ has lost his jacket. How do you lose a jacket. It is not a small jacket. The weather is cold and normally that means one wears a jacket to avoid the chill and therefore logically not leave it behind, when there a wind chill factor that does nothing for manhood, but does lots for extra layers of clothing, such as a jacket.

So suspicions were high, given when presented with his special new gift of some weeks ago, his teenager in horror face and without a zit in sight,.

We had dreams that we could turn him away from the Dark side, we would bring colour to his sea of black. He did not like it and he decided to let us know the mega expensive bit of cloth was an alleged fashion style icon from the Time that Land Forgot or something like that. The jacket was not a hit. But it was expensive, we were adults, we insisted on pain of something that could be painful.

More than not a hit. It was now a Jacket to be found by a passing tramp that may now be the talk of the hobo community with his super-cool orangey bluey jacket with a stripey bit and importantly for all things Goth-less, is not black.


Charity begins at home and donations to my teenager's lifestyle should also end at home. Call me old fashioned, as my teenager probably does, but some tramp with his new non-black jacket is not my idea of helping society, when a teenager is getting frost bite to be a political- fashion-correct.

Still a story must be told by the young ones for the old folks, the gullible old folks, the parents lost in 80's chic, he has a story to tell, a story that starts on a cold dark night and certainly ended with our expensive jacket gift being not deliberately left at on the grass, but was sadly forgotten in a moment of madness.

Yes he regrets it, he knows it cost an arm and a leg. But he secretly knows that whilst he could getaway with not putting a leg in it due to human geometry. He could unfortunately put two arms in it. His Goth roots would sadly be challenged by the bike-shed posse, if he turned up with even one arm in it. He knows retained possesion of the jacket would have caused parental pressure to wear his jolly jacket and Goth friends being Goth friends who judge things by shades of black going on grey, may have discarded him as mainstream sellout. Peer group pressure is stronger than the pen or the sword.

By the grey of my hair, we are parents not born yesterday, so to cut a long story short, it was not lost, it was hidden. Although the time between lost and in hiding was a subtle interrogation lasting several hours, as in 24 hours make one day and more hours make additional days. Thankfully for adult sanity it did not last a week.

Hey.... to not cut a story to short, I have a new jacket, a revenge of sorts for my lack of socks, I am again now looking as mutton dressed as lamb and surprisingly not of my choice damn it, it was expensive.