Cuffed!

Two nights ago I was running from work to a good-bye party for a close work colleague.

He had a penchant for French striped matelot tops. So having torn my shirt off and put on my unaccustomed yachting attire, I removed the cufflinks from the shirt and put them in my pocket, so that the shirt would be ready for the laundry in the shop next door in the morning.

My cufflinks are special to me. They are gold, simple, and almost the only possession I have that my father owned. I have worn them every time I have ever presented Channel 4 News from our studio (I tend not to wear them “in the field” for fear of losing them).

As I put them in my pocket I had the passing thought that doing so, loose, was risky.

I went out to my bike to cycle to the party and found I had a puncture. So I made my way by cab. Half way through the evening I became aware that one of my precious cufflinks was missing. There was only one in my pocket.

Scrambling around like a baboon I searched the small space in which I had been sitting, and found nothing. I told the publican of my loss and began to adjust to the idea that this unbroken link with my dad was finally finished.

Having blogged, the following morning I left home five minutes late for work and suddenly remembered, I had no bike. I was going to miss our vital 9.30am editorial meeting. There were no cabs and I ran to the tube station.

I have almost never been to work any other way than on a bike. I was amazed how fast I reached Euston…almost beating my biking commute. I ran up the escalator – wearing my one cufflink – having buttoned the other cuff. I reached the concourse, and trying to make up time, made for the cab rank.

As I descended the fixed stairway to the cabs, a gold cufflink fell at my left foot. There it was, my dad’s simple gold oval cufflink.

A Ghanaian parent at the school where he taught had had it made for him from his country’s gold. I unbuttoned the cuff and was suddenly restored for normal duty.

Where had it been?

I had scoured my pockets – the little ticket cups in the side pockets – the lot. It wasn’t in any of them. I had no trouser turn-ups, the shirt was clean. Had it been in some fold? Who knows.

But if I hadn’t had the puncture, it would assuredly fallen unseen in the road as I pedalled. And if it had fallen as I ran up the Euston escalators, I would never have seen it when it fell.

How was it that it had appeared on the one deserted stairway, when I happened to be going at a pedestrian pace, and happened to be looking down?

A small and ridiculous thing, a passing event, and yet this tiny artefact has been structural in my anchoring of well over 5,000 editions of Channel 4 News. Lucky boy!