The Ned Wood Archive

Joe

Joe didn’t sleep much.  Too excited.  Plus, he was checking his phone all the time to make sure it was charging and then again to see whether it was time to get up yet and then one more time to make sure it was still charging.  The good news is, he managed to put the charging cable into the socket on his phone, not in the gap between the phone and the case.  Well, could have happened to anybody.

He’s gonna get down to the showers early, to be sure he doesn’t miss Ellie.  Even so he gets up fifteen minutes ahead of when he planned.  Anyway, the sun is already way up and is already frying all of the tents on Pennard Hill and all of their occupants, so he may as well get out in the fresh air.

But when he pulls on his cargo shorts and goes through his left pocket/right pocket/phone check, he discovers that his wallet is missing.  So he checks again.  Phone in phone sized pocket. Fine.  Clashfinder print out in thigh pocket.  Fine.  Credit card in left hand pocket.  Fine.  Wallet in right hand pocket.  Missing.  These are the shorts he was wearing the day before, surely.  He searches for, finds, and checks his other pair of shorts.  Empty.  So he checks the pocket that’s sown into the inside of the tent.  Not there.  He pulls up his sleeping bag to see whether it’s underneath.  It ain’t.  Nor is it under the self inflating camp mattress.  He roots through the assorted underwear and socks and shirts that lie around inside his tent, then he goes through the other clothing, used and unused.  Nothing.

He’s pretty sure he’d know if someone had ripped him off during the night – he would have heard them undo the zip to the outer tent and the zip to the inner tent and would definitely have heard them messing about with his shorts which were further down in the tent.  Anyway, they’d have taken the phone wouldn’t they?  If they just needed his cash, they would have taken that out of the wallet and dumped it, wouldn’t they?  Conclusion: the wallet is in the tent somewhere.

Joe’s first reaction had been a manic quick search without a coherent, systematic approach.  Now that’s failed, he goes to the other extreme and empties the complete contents of his tent out (and fortunately it’s dry outside) and then reorders the contents back into the tent one by one.  Self inflating camp mattress.  Sleeping bag (having reversed it to make sure nothing was inside).  Clean clothes, one by one.  Bag of dirty clothes, tipped out onto the ground and restuffed one by one.  Bag of toiletries.  Towel.  Then he goes through the stuff in the outer tent. Checks both boots and both trainers.  Checks the bag for the tent and the bag for the bed and the bag for the sleeping bag.  And both of his back packs, the big one and the day pack.  Nothing.

When everything is back inside his tent, he checks outside.  Round the tent.  Between the inner tent and the fly.  Still nothing.  So he does it all again – he goes through all of his clothes and everything else he’s brought, one by one.  Cos you know it’s gotta be here somewhere, hasn’t it?  He gets like this when he’s lost something.  He can’t give up.  He keeps searching and searching till he’s got the solution.  Even when the article is worth far less than the time he’s wasted searching. Although in this case, the number that’s in the wallet is the most precious thing he’s got at Glastonbury. 

Still nothing.

OK, so when was the last time he saw it?  Up in the Park.  He retraces his steps from last night, his eyes scanning the ground.  He meanders through the tents down to the track, then along the track, then up in front of the stalls to the lower Park entrance.  Then he paces backwards and forwards, like a vacuum cleaner desperately needing to hoover up the missing wallet.  He checks out Sweet Charity and the Wishing Well.  He checks out the areas in front of the stalls.  He sees a bunch of litter pickers making their way towards him, with their matching blue T-shirts and their various cans/compost/litter bags and their litter grabbing tools.  He asks a couple of them whether they’ve seen his wallet.  They’ve not seen anything, but they point out the group leader in her orange hi-vis.  He asks her, but the score for today is some assorted change, a whiskey flask (empty), and an expensive Patagonia waterproof.  There is a debit card belonging to a Mr D.V. Davies, but he can’t have it without the correct ID.  Needless to say, none of that is what he needs this morning.

Joe sits down at the picnic table.  The same one that he was sat at when he first saw Ellie.  He runs through what he did last night and where he went.  And he runs through what he’s done this morning and where he’s looked.  He closes his eyes to focus his thought process.  He’d normally love the feeling of the sun on his eyelids, but this morning he’s frustrated, annoyed, and angry.  And hot.  

Then he realises that searching for his wallet isn’t the most important thing he needs to be doing this morning.  The fifty quid he’s lost he can live with.  Ellie’s number he won’t need, he’ll just get it again this morning and put it straight on his phone, which, as he’s checked twenty or thirty times already, is nicely, fully, beautifully charged.  He sees the time and he’s already over an hour late.  Shit.  He runs down the track across Pennard Hill towards the Greenpeace showers.