I’ve just been reunited with my magic umbrella for the fourth time in a decade. Hewn from oak by Swaine Adeney Brigg, this umbrella was a wildly generous 30th-birthday present from my old friend (and mutual best man) Aster Crawshaw. It was almost immediately purloined from the cloakroom of Joe Allen’s in Covent Garden. I mentioned this in an interview I gave to the Daily Telegraph, and was amazed to receive an email from Swaine Adeney Brigg offering me a replacement. All was well for several years until I realised the umbrella was again missing. I had no memory of the last time I’d carried it. Too bereft to buy a replacement, many umbrella-less months passed until, one night, I was in a minicab on the way home from supper with my brother. ‘My friend, I remember you!’ the driver exclaimed, ‘I think maybe you left an umbrella in my car last year?’ So I did. And it was delivered back to me the next day. I don’t consider myself especially lucky, but when a few years later the umbrella vanished from the lobby stand at the Connaught, I left my number with the porter, serenely confident it would be returned. And it was. After five hours. With a note of apology so profuse it could have been written by E.M. Forster’s umbrella-rustling Helen Schlegel. The most recent loss occurred on a train to Salisbury. Because Aster had presciently asked for my name to be engraved on the brolly’s brass collar, a splendid employee of South West Trains was able to Google my email and arrange for collection. I’m now torn between never taking the umbrella out of the house again, or hurling it into the sea to discover just how magical it really is.
This is an extract from Ben Schott's Diary.