Things that got lost: it’s the news from Britain

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Ever since some inventor turned metal detectors loose in the world, people have been finding loot in British fields–Roman coins, Anglo-Saxon silver hoards, prehistoric whatevers–and especially when I read about those coins I can’t help wondering, Who put them there? Were they lost? Were they hidden? Why haven’t they been found until now? 

I won’t pretend to answer any of those questions, but I thought I’d remind us–a category in which I somewhat obviously include myself–that it’s not just ancient people who lose stuff. We do it all the time. So let’s talk about stuff that gets found in Britain, since that implies it got itself lost in the first place.

Irrelevant photo: a camellia

Secret documents

Someone going to a football game in Newcastle parked his car and found documents spilling out of a black plastic bag. Being the nosy sort of person I admire, he looked to see what they were and found what the paper called “potentially confidential military information,” including names, ranks, emails addresses, shift patterns, details of weapons they were issued, and codes for an armory’s intruder detections system. 

Wheee. 

What were they doing spilling out of a black plastic bag and strewn along a street in Newcastle? The Ministry of Defense is “looking into this urgently.” They’ll get back to us when hell freezes over, or possibly a few weeks after.

Coins

No metal detectorist of the future is likely to find this set: as Britain sleepwalks its way toward a cashless society, significantly fewer children are being rushed to hospitals after swallowing coins. They’re harder for sticky little hands to find.

How significant is “significantly fewer”? From 2012 to 2024, the number of under-18s who had nose, airway, or throat surgery after swallowing a small object declined by 29%. Historically, coins swallowed by children younger than 6 accounted for 75% of those surgeries, since not a whole lot of 17-year-olds swallow coins, probably because no one’s promoting it on TikTok. 

Yet.

Parents still have to worry about magnets and button batteries (shiny, smooth, highly appealing, and I bet I’d have tried one if they’d been around when I was at the coin-swallowing age). 

Remarkably few toddlers swallow credit cards.

Monsters

Here I admit I’m pushing the category. This story’s not from Britain but the US, which doesn’t have a lot of ancient coin hoards to be found but has more than enough political monsters to make up for a shortage in any other category.

A babysitter in Kansas was having trouble getting one of the kids settled in bed because there was a monster under the bed.

No monster, she said. I’ll take a look to prove it.

She looked and found a man lying on the floor. 

I’d love to give you a blow-by-blow of what happened next, but all I know is that there was a fight, the babysitter and one kid were knocked down, and the man took off running but was arrested the next morning. He used to live there, although not under the bed, and already had a court order to stay away. 

The kid will never sleep again.

Creme Eggs

If you’re not from Britain, you need to know that Creme Eggs appear every Easter. They’re chocolate and have horrid-looking white and yellow stuff inside. I don’t know what they taste like and I’m afraid to find out. I suspect that you have to grow up with them to think they’re a good idea and you might’ve figured out by now that I didn’t.

However. The people who love them love them, and a man in Dogsthorpe, which is in Peterborough, which is someplace or other in Britain–it hasn’t been lost lately–was arrested after stealing 325 of them. That’s £220.50 worth of chocolate-covered runny goop. When he was arrested, he had a duffel bag full of them and a “suspicious bulge” in his jacket. The arresting officer went to unzip it and the suspect warned him, “It’s all gonna fall out.” Which is what makes this qualify as stuff that gets found. In Britain.

Aldi

Can I slip in something that doesn’t get found? A Welsh village of 500 people was listed online as having an Aldi store. (Aldi’s a discount supermarket chain.) More people than the roads can handle promptly showed up to do their shopping and a milk tanker got stuck in a narrow lane trying to make a delivery.

The farmer who went to help the driver said, “Poor fella tried pulling up and backing the trailer up our hill in a misguided attempt at turning around. Went down with a tractor but the fella had no idea where the towing eye was, so I left it to the experts.

“They straightened him out to go to Hiraethog to turn around. As he was rounding the corner at the bottom of the hill, he slowed down to open his window and thank us–and nearly got stuck again, bless his cotton socks.”

It’s surprising how easily a truck can get stuck in Britain’s narrowest roads. Or a camper van. Or anything like that. A road near us is locally famous for swallowing trucks whole. It now has a sign, put up by the residents, warning of narrow lanes, stone walls, sharp turns, and enough other dangers to make the sign pretty much unreadable. They left off the dragons, hostile residents, and Vandal hordes, but my partner and I are thinking of adding them some night under cover of darkness.

The phantom store was apparently the work of a prankster, but when the story ran in January, Aldi’s website hadn’t gotten rid of the imaginary store. 

Bananas

In Nottinghamshire, a plate of peeled bananas has been appearing once a month. When the article I’m stealing this from first ran, also in January, the bananas had been showing up for more than a year. If anyone knows what they mean or who’s leaving them, they’re not talking.  

They don’t appear to have been lost, only found.

Cave art

In 2005, Banksy smuggled a cave art-style drawing, Peckham Rock, into the British Museum and it stayed there for three days before it was spotted. It showed a human figure, an auroch-type beast with two arrows in its side, and a supermarket trolley, which is what I’d call a supermarket cart. The cart was the giveaway, as was the cement it was drawn on. 

The staff only spotted it after Banksy’s website challenged people to find it. 

It was returned to him and thirteen years later he lent it back to the museum as part of an exhibition called I Object: Ian Hislop’s Search for Dissent.

A government report

The Home Office spent at least £22,000 and three years trying to bury an internal report on the Windrush scandal. The scandal? Well, the Home Office had announced that it would create a hostile climate for illegal immigrants and ended up detaining and deporting hundreds of legal immigrants whose presence in Britain dated back to the Windrush generation: immigrants from British Caribbean islands who’d been encouraged to immigrate to Britain to help it recover from World War II. 

The report found that the scandal had its roots in 30 years of racist immigration law. You’re shocked, I know. So was the Home Office. That’s why they decided to bury it.

A transparency campaigner managed to get the report released. Without using a metal detector.

Norfolk Island

We’re leaving Britain for this one, but we’ll touch base briefly before we head out the door for another week. 

You probably already know about Trump imposing tariffs on Heard and McDonald Islands, which are both uninhabited, at least by humans. Less well known is the 29% tariff imposed on Norfolk Island, population 2,188 squeezed into 13.4 square miles. But small as it is, Trump & Co. found it.  

What did the place do to get whacked with that tariff? They seem to have gotten their silly selves mixed up with Norfolk, UK, Norfolk; Virginia (if you’ll look on a map you’ll find that in the US); and New Hampshire, which is also in the US and is abbreviated NH, not NI, but hell, they’re all letters so you could see how a person might mix them up.

The administrator of Norfolk Island said, “There are no known exports from Norfolk Island to the United States.” 

That didn’t stop the US Observatory of Economic Complexity–

Okay, I need to interrupt myself here: that sounds like a department I’d invent but I’m quoting an article in a reputable newspaper, The Guardian. And I checked with Lord Google to be sure. It appears to be entirely real. 

So: that didn’t stop the US Observatory of Economic Complexity from either blaming or crediting it–take your pick–for exporting £504,000 worth of goods to the US. 

The problem seems to stem from errors on the bills of lading, although the article says, as if tippy-toeing through a minefield, that it’s not “alleging that the companies are responsible for the errors.” I believe that translates to, “Don’t sue us.”

Don’t sue me either. I’m not alleging anything. I’m just sitting on the couch reading the newspaper and bothering you about it.

History

History was lost briefly and then found and restored on a US government website.

A US National Parks Service page about the Underground Railroad–a network that helped slaves escape to freedom–took down a photo of Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who made repeated, not to mention wildly risky, trips into the slave states, leading something like 70 people to freedom.

The Underground Railroad? That was a network that sheltered escaped slaves on their way to safety. So, yeah, why mention its best-known conductor?

After an outcry, to my surprise, the page has been restored, at least to the point of including Tubman. The revised page–the one that you won’t find anymore–emphasized “Black/White Cooperation,” not the efforts of enslaved people to escape slavery. In fact, the first paragraph avoided any mention of slavery.

Give the folks in charge a bit more time and we’ll find that slavery never happened at all. It was all just another experiment in Black/White Cooperation and a bit of a misunderstanding.

52 thoughts on “Things that got lost: it’s the news from Britain”

  2. I used to like Chocolate Creme Eggs a lot, then the recipe was changed after the company that makes them (or part of it, I can’t remember which) was sold to an American company. Goodness knows what they taste like now when things are being made with cheaper and inferior ingredients. I haven’t tried one in years.

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  4. I used to cut the top off a crème egg and then stick my tongue into the fondant to fetch it out. I’ve grown out of that though.

    I’d love to go on holiday and find road signs saying ‘here be dragons’.

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  6. When customers at work complain that “everything” (they mean where I work) has gone cashless now, I used to say (half-joking), something like, “Yeah, and then one day someone will pull the plug and we’ll have no money!” Now, thanks to your item on it, I’ll remember the plus side. Some number of children will presumably live, who wouldn’t have otherwise, to see the day they have no money.

    I was hoping you might have included the news about the Supreme Court, which just rediscovered for everyone the lost knowledge of what a woman is, but maybe it’s a bit too recent.

    Another lovely article; great comments – I can’t wait for Dr. Prunesquallor to return.

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      • Not really a funny subject, Ellen, I agree. It is necessary to clarify these things, though, as at the moment, there are groups in society who seem so convinced of their own rights and righteousness that they want to override the rights of others. It may sound pious and boring but we all have to compromise when it comes to getting along. Women’s rights have been hard won and there are many instances even in apparently advanced democracies where those rights are being rapidly eroded once again. The Scottish case is a classic example of the result of legislating without properly considering the possible consequences and potential for abuse. Nothing much changes in that respect…

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          • Do you see the court decision I was referring to as an “attack on trans people”? I think it clarifies that the Equalities Act doesn’t give trans-identified males the right to enter women’s spaces, play in women’s sports, or demand to be accepted as lesbians. I see that as a win for feminism (though I’m no expert on its waves), and the regrettable losses “trans” people suffer because of it will be the result of the unreasonable expectations they were promised by trans activists, who have done immense damage to society already and royally piss me off!

            Trans-identified people retain protection under the Act against discrimination on the grounds of gender reassignment, but will have to adjust to using the toilets and changing-rooms for their biological sex (or gender neutral ones). That isn’t the contradiction in terms it might appear, because they have access to all the necessary resources – toilets, sports, changing rooms – they just have to use the right ones.

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            • It’s taken me a while to get back to you because I wanted to give my answer some thought. By way of context, I think the issues raised by people transitioning from one gender to another are complicated as hell and the discussion about them is being carried out as if they were simple. This isn’t helping. And a lot of the situations people are cranked up about are being exaggerated.
              In fact, the number of trans athletes wanting to play women’s sports is so small that an attempt to study them couldn’t identify enough to make up a decent study.

              I understand that some women are uncomfortable with the possibility of trans women sharing a toilet, but hey, we use cubicles. Basically, the only thing we’d be sharing are the sinks. I’ve heard some rumblings about that being a safety issue, which is, frankly, absurd. I’m all too aware of the dangers women face. If someone’s concerned about a rapist-in-trans clothing, banning trans women from women’s rooms will do nothing to protect us. I know a number of trans women and a couple of trans men. None of them pose a threat. What I am concerned about is the safety of a trans woman in a men’s room–stop for a minute and think about the problems built into that–and for me safety trumps discomfort. And how uncomfortable will women be if a trans man suddenly appears in their midst, needing to pee? What is the right place for them to do that?

              Should we have individual, ungendered toilets? Sure, but in a climate where public services are being cut and then cut some more, how likely is that to happen? In the meantime, people will need to pee.

              Are trans people the victims of unreasonable expectations that activists promised them? Not in my experience. They’re more likely to be the activists, asking that a space be made for them. I don’t see them doing damage to society, immense or otherwise. This is a group of people who’ve been with us, mostly unseen, since forever, some as drag queens or transvestites or very butch dykes (not that all of them want to transition, but it was one place they could be found), others making themselves invisible. What’s changed is that medical technology’s given them a new possibility, and with it a new visibility.

              Finally, the issue of trans women and lesbians. From what I’ve read there were no lesbians on the court that ruled on trans rights. The lesbian community’s divided on the issue. It’s probably best left for us–lesbians and trans women–to work out. I predict it won’t be easy, but then the court’s decision isn’t going down smoothly either.

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              • These types will now be barred from legally accessing women’s spaces. I’m a bit scared they’re now required to use mine. https://is.gd/7Ak911

                Many of them are getting locked up in women’s prisons, and even suddenly declaring they’re trans when convicted for exactly that purpose.

                Lesbians tried working it out between them and “transwomen”. That didn’t work. They complain they can’t go on their own social media platforms because it’s full of blokes identifying as lesbians. And legally, lesbians could not form societies with more than 25 members (IIRC) without having to accept them.

                If you want to have the last word, I’ll leave it at that – it was off topic anyway.

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                • The last word? Oooh! Who could resist?

                  My sense is that the fear of trans people is strongest among people who don’t know any. They pose no more threat than other humans. Admittedly, we’re a difficult species, but I wouldn’t worry about your spaces suddenly being unsafe. They’re people, that’s all.

                  Prisons: according to government statistics, on 31st March 2024. Of the 295 transgender prisoners, 51 were in female prisons. Hardly a flood but certainly a group whose handling needs to be considered. I hold to my conviction that this is a complicated issue, unlikely to be solved well by simple solutions. Surely the prison system could factor in a person’s criminal record if they request transfer to a women’s prison, although they’d need the legal room to maneuver if they were going to do that.

                  I did a quick consult with Lord Google on trans women in online spaces for lesbians and found some that welcome trans women and ban transphobic comments. I also found something about problems on–I think it was Tinder. Again, we’re not going to get a simple picture here. It’s not accurate to say that we tried to work it out and it didn’t work. Some lesbians are supportive of trans women, some are furious about them. We’re not all in agreement. To the best of my knowledge, we never were. On anything. Like most humans.

                  Thanks for raising an interesting question and pushing me to think more deeply about it.

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  7. Last year, my husband lost a lot of weight (deliberately) and as result, lost his wedding ring while we were out for a walk. We looked in vain, every time we walked the same route. A couple of months later, I was weeding the edge of the path at the top of the garden and there it was, at least six inches down in the soil. It might have stayed forever, getting deeper in but for our decision to clear and level the path. We live on quite a steep slope so every lot of rainfall brings down soil and rock with it, making the path harder to negotiate. It’s now edged with tree branches and rock in an effort to hold back the debris. Finding the ring was a happy reward.

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  9. Windrush was a scandal? I only ever knew it was a brand of yarn. And today in the US someone’s saying that Trump’s threatening to deport Afghan Christians, who were invited here, just out of reactionary spite…as if there weren’t enough illegal border jumpers who were NOT invited here left to deport. Fake news, one can hope. Some people will post anything about Trump so long as it’s bad. If this story turns out to be true I wonder what name will be given this scandal…

    Nobody swallows the cards, but the third-party payment options certainly swallow a lot of money. All the best stores here are offering discounts for cash payment again.

    Pris cilla King

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    • The Afghan refugee story is true: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-admin-tells-afghan-refugees-who-fled-taliban-self-deportreport-2061049. As for the Windrush scandal, it was named after the first ship to bring Caribbean immigrants (also invited–in fact, encouraged) to Britain after the war. When the political winds shifted, they started deporting many of them, illegally, after lifetimes of working and building lives here. They’re now owed compensation, and oddly enough that doesn’t seem to be getting paid.

      As for illegal immigrants, when you close off the legal pathways, guess what happens? Desperate people, fleeing wars and famines and assorted other threats to life, will do whatever they have to do. Remember that business about the US being a country of immigrants? We used to be proud of that.

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