Where Did That Go/Come From

The noticeboard was bare: all the posters had disappeared. I found them in the porch, neatly placed on a bench. I presumed they'd been blown off the noticeboard in the wind, and someone had put them in the porch, but this was just a presumption as nobody had said anything. This is an inverse version of the more usual phenomenon of extra notices appearing outside or indeed inside the church, with little stacks of flyers for events or organisations popping up on the desk in the entrance area. The same day, Sally the Pastoral Assistant called my attention to a group of small tins which had arrived in the kitchen, unheralded and unexplained, while Sandra the administrator wondered about a bin which had gone missing and was found in an entirely unexpected place. The church, you see, is a space to which many, many people have access to for a variety of different purposes, and all of them feel that they have a right, nay often a duty, to fiddle with it, but do not usually remember to pass on information about how they have done so.

The oddest example (recently) was a tin of baked beans that rested on a shelf of the bookcase where we keep the orders of service for weeks. Every time I saw it I wondered how it had arrived, and resolved to take it to the food-bank basket at the Co-Op, and then forgot to do it. Yesterday I was actually going there to do a food-bank shop, and finally remembered the tin of beans at the right moment. This time, at last, it would find its way to where it could be truly useful, rather than an out-of-place oddity.

Of course, it had gone.