Being helpful, but…

Having just “lost” an important something which was actually hiding in plain sight – or maybe not so much hiding as have been put down in an unexpected and random place, I thought back to my dad and mum and an occasion where something went missing in their home. Now I am pretty sure they didn’t have a boggart – you know what a boggart is, a kindly but inadvertently annoying house goblin who thinks it is being helpful but unfortunately isn’t. Our boggart’s particular way of being helpful is that when he notices the overwhelmingly untidy state of our house, he tries to “tidy up”. This means items, even those who are regularly used every day, are “tidied away” to unexpected, unusual and sometimes downright bizarre places. I have a very small work room, as small as the other smallest room in the house. It is crammed with books and stuff, and this morning I needed a particular notebook quite urgently… Guess what happened over the next hour…

Anyway it has been found (in the bedroom, in the basket where I keep my shoes) so all is well. Here is a story from a while ago, about my parents, and it may or may not have involved a boggart:

I seem to have written more about Donald, my dad, than Monica, my mum. I guess he was a naughty boy and got up to all sorts of tricks and mischief, though none of it malicious or unkind… just adventurous  curious, wondering what would happen if…

Monica had a great sense of humour, and was so intelligent and very funny, and was the master of the straight face. After giving up smoking, Donald took up snuff (which I also enjoyed from time to time) He had a little oval pewter snuff box and enjoyed his pastime –  and Monica… hated it! She hated the whole thing, the snuff, the taking of snuff, the idea of taking snuff. She would watch without a word as he would take a pinch of snuff, and either take it from pinched finger and thumb, or off the useful little depression on the back of his hand between thumb and first finger.

One day, Donald couldn’t find his little oval pewter snuff box, but he didn’t like to ask Monica if she had seen it, and may even have wondered if she had deliberately hidden it… but of course she wouldn’t do that. So he surreptitiously began a search, lifting cushions, looking along window sills, looking in strange places for it. He didn’t realise but Monica observed him doing this, and was secretly very amused… even more amused because she knew exactly where the snuff box was, it had rolled under their bed!

Eventually she had to tell him, and then couldn’t resist laughing, and he laughed too at the gentle little trick she had played, and the innocent fun she had had from watching him trying to be surreptitious as he searched for the snuff box!

My featured image is of a fairy, no doubt distantly related to a boggart. It is the badge I had when I was in the Brownies, and the “six” I was in was the fairies – there were others, elves, gnomes, pixies etc, but I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a boggarts six!