RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33740, 13 January 1975, Page 15

RANDOM REMINDER

LOST PROPERTY

The owners of objects left after a party are not always easy to trace. Some people only realise they have lost something when next they want to use it, which could be several days later when they have been to many other places. If the hosts at a party have no clue as to whose the object may be. and they happen not to ring the owner, the object may remain lost almost indefinitely. Sometimes, in addition, objects are never claimed because the owner considers them of little value or is embarrassed to claim ownership (?.s when he was at the party with his girl-friend instead of his wife, or when he does not wish to admit he wears stays). Recently we heard of a hostess who found an object after a party

which must have been of considerable value to the owner and was unlikely to have embarrassed anybody except perhaps a Welsh Nationalist. It was a sporran. When someone suggested it should not be too hard to find the owner, she eaid: “I can’t think where to start asking. There were a lot of people here.” Certain lost items should be easy to identify, but others are of so common a kind and so like the rest of their kind that only special training or unusual perceptivenes.s enables them to be distinguished. Ask any policeman who has to identify missing bicycles without knowing their frame numbers. The identification of people presents similar and at time.s even more intractable problems. The general description

‘‘Homo sapiens, erect four-legged animal, front legs seldom used for walking, often without fur on face and parts of limbs” could apply to most of us.

Luckily, however, we may be distinguished through such feature* as eye and complexion colour, height, weight,, sex and age, and the New Zealand police are adept at eliciting appropriate information from friends and neighbours when someone is missing.

Nevertheless, not all police forces have reached the same degree of sophistication, a# witness the following notice in a Fiji newspaper. “Nadi police are looking for a 25-year-old missing scrubcutter.

“Ram Natu P . . . was last seen at his home at Lavusa. “He has a dark complexion.”