Lost property

It's over 18 years since my child-who-loses-everything left this school but the ritual of hanging lost property on the fence at the end of term still attracts my attention as I go past. I'm sure some of his coats will show up one day.

When he was about 8 we stopped buying him coats altogether and he never missed them. He took to losing the next layer down instead. When I later worked in a place that was given bags of lost property from Oxford's clubs, I used to search them for his missing hoodies. In vain. Everyone else's but not his.