Why does it always happen to me?

About forty-five years ago I came across a couple roughly my parents’ age who ran a preparatory school. Both were steeped in academia and the wife, interested in linguistics, was a huge fan of Noam Chomsky’s seminal tome Theory Of Universal Grammar Is Right; It’s Hardwired Into Our Brains which posited the theory that we are all born with an innate knowledge of grammar that renders language a basic human instinct.

[At least, that’s how I eventually came to understand the theory after she kindly explained it to me over time in several different simplistic ways. This far forwards, I can now reveal that – back then, with my primary interests in life being alcohol, football and behaving irresponsibly – I was already on the outer limits of my intellectual capacity just getting to grips with linguistics as a concept, never mind the fact that anyone might choose of their own volition to bother studying it for a living.]

It occurred to me as I came to the keyboard this morning that it was in the same era when I first became aware of what two staples of life in the last quarter of the 20th Century –  the verb ‘to bonk’ and Murphy’s Law.

Things in those days being a bit hazy to me now, I cannot recall how my girlfriend – later my spouse – and I fell into close friendship with a free-spirited dark, short-haired, pretty lady who worked in a City organisation.

One bright Saturday morning we popped around to see her at her flat and found her, still in bed and deeply hungover, recovering from what evidently had been a heavy night on the town. Don’t ask me why, but I remember the occasion chiefly because, having sleepily let us in wearing a dressing gown, as she jumped back into bed and laid back to begin our conversation, she inadvertently revealed her right breast which remained on display until my future bride told her to ‘put it away’. But I digress. As we caught up on our respective news, she suddenly announced – with refreshing candour – that the previous evening she had ‘bonked’ some bloke she’d met in a bar.

It was the first time that I’d heard the word (would it be described as ‘slang’?) yet immediately I was attracted to it. Somehow it seemed simultaneously both simple and direct and yet also vaguely amusing and appropriate for an activity that was fundamentally basic, not least because it stripped away the faux ‘romantic’ connotations with which polite society likes to sanitise the human version of what we cheerfully refer to as ‘mating’, ‘rutting’ or ‘covering’ when applied to the animal kingdom.

Murphy’s Law – that if it is at all technically/physically possible for something to go wrong, then at some point it probably will – I had been already encountered many times in my life … and still do to this day. I just didn’t have a term for it until ‘Murphy’s Law’ came along.

You know the sort of thing.

Walking past a door – having done similar hundreds of times previously without incident – you suddenly catch your pullover sleeve, or trouser pocket, or some wire or hook on the item you are carrying, on the door handle. This falls squarely under the associated heading ‘Things You Couldn’t Possibly Achieve If You Were Trying To’.

Or rushing out to your parked car late at night to collect the smartphone you left inside.

Inevitably, as you fling open the door to grab said item, your car keys suddenly vault out of your hand, into the air and land somewhere within the interior. Possibly onto the front passenger seat floor, or down the side of a seat. Or maybe into a side pocket of one of the doors. Or maybe (somehow defying the laws of physics) into the boot. In the dense darkness of the night. Can you find it? Well, of course, eventually you do – but only after what seems like hours of frantic searching and, of course, in the process completely undermining what you had originally intended to achieve, i.e. a simple two-minute dash to the car to retrieve your smartphone before retiring to bed.

If there was any fairness in life – I was almost going to type ‘God’ there but managed to stop myself – there ought to be an exact opposite to Murphy’s Law. I don’t know, maybe there already is, but it’s just that I’ve never encountered it.

One where one day, eventually, if you like by a form of guaranteed serendipity – if that’s not a false term for something dependent upon random happenchance – you will always manage to rectify something, or retrieve a situation, that has gone inexplicably wrong in the past.

If anyone could tell me how to do this – or even arrange it off their own bat – I’d be more than happy to propose a new entry to the Oxford English Dictionary linked to their name.

Here’s my little problem.

Probably a couple of years ago now, again the exact length of time being possibly under- or over-estimated because of my age-affected perception, I possessed a Tag watch and two signet rings. One of the latter, the older of the two, was of particular sentimental value – firstly, it had been given to me by my beloved grandmother on my father’s side upon my eighteenth birthday; and secondly, one item on the coat of arms design engraved upon it was erroneous.

I had only discovered this about twenty-five years later when I was contemplating getting similar signet rings made for my two kids.

In a discussion with the proprietor of a classy jewellery shop about the project, she looked up the coat of arms in a heraldry book and pointed out that – on my existing (organised by my grandmother) ring, the phoenix above the shield proper had its wings ‘open’, when – according to the official heraldry book – my family’s phoenix atop the shield should have its wings ‘closed’. It was a question of ‘rank’, you see. (I cannot now remember whether wings ‘open’ or ‘closed’ signified greater rank but, knowing my family, we’d probably got it wrong and claimed greater rank than we were actually due).

My point was/is that I wanted my family to have the ‘correct’ version and so ended up ordering three rings, the third for myself.

Hence me being in possession of two signet rings – one, the new one, being my normal one to wear but for me the old one (my grandmother’s) retained its attraction, perhaps even now enhanced by the ‘error’ it contained.

Anyway, as I was beginning to recount, a couple of years ago I went to my tallboy drawer containing my two signet rings and Tag watch and – for some reason – I took them out and decided that, for general security reasons, that I ought to place them in a new location. One so secure, but also obvious to me, that as a result there would never be any chance of anyone finding and ‘lifting them.

Well, that bit of the scheme worked perfectly.

I can say that because ever since that fateful day – and I’ve searched for them upon numerous occasions – I’ve never again set eyes upon them. I’m sure they’re somewhere within my home. And, come to that, somewhere pretty uncomplicated, so that I’d remember it.

But aye, there’s the rub. I cannot remember it. And believe me, I’ve tried. My only hope this far on is that, one day, out of the blue, by chance, I shall come across them.

I’m still waiting. Anyone out there want to get their name in the Oxford English Dictionary?