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.

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.