The Saint of Lost Things

I suffered a minor disaster at the beginning of last week when a clutch of coach and rail tickets I'd just bought for the last leg of my travels around the UK mysteriously went missing..... and I had to replace them at the last minute (thereby inflicting grievous budgetary harm on my already puny reserves of cash).

A friend I was meeting for dinner that night suggested that I call upon the assistance of St. Anthony - a quaint custom in her family which she claims has proven apparently efficacious for her on a number of occasions. I confess I'd never heard of this saint before (any of them: Wikipedia recognises half a dozen or more holy men of that name; but this site suggests that there are two who may be responsible for the 'lost & found' duties in heaven). St. Christopher is really the only such "helpful" saint I've come across. And I'd never thought him of much use, since I'm sure many hundreds of people each year must perish in shipwrecks and plane crashes while wearing medallions with his "protective" image on them.

I was loathe to have any truck with such batty Catholic superstition. And it seemed to me that any "intercession" by St. Anthony on this occasion would just be annoying rather than helpful, in that I had already shelled out for new tickets, and thus discovery of the originals would merely prove that the unfortunate accident had been the result of my own foolishness rather than external foul play. And so, indeed, it proved: the dratted tickets turned up as I was leaving for the station next morning, hiding in plain sight (as lost things always seem to do), exactly where I thought I'd put them, the first (and seventh and eleventh and...) place I'd looked for them. Damn.

St. Anthony, I feel, has drawn a particularly thankless job from the heavenly employment agency. Lost things (and missing persons - the other part of his brief), after all, usually remain lost, and thus bring incalculable inconvenience and heartache into the world, even to the most devout of Catholics. And even if he does come through for you, 9 times out of 10 it's probably going to be too late to make any difference, and - as in my case - he's just going to add to your vexation by showing you that the lost things weren't really "lost" after all. He seems to me to be one of those divine agents who is more of a punisher (albeit of a relatively mild degree most of the time: a horrid taunter and teaser, but at least not a smiter) than a bringer of succour.

Who'd be St. Anthony? Not me!