This past week has been an unhappy one for me. You will remember the dinner last Saturday, beautiful art, beautiful people, beautiful food and drink.

As always misery and pain are never far away.

But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white–then melts for ever;
Or like the borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow’s lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm.–

It is my great privilege to own a canteen of silver cutlery. Actually I do not like to use the verb own. I am the family member that has it at the moment. It is a family er thing.

It is one of my earliest memories. I climbed up to look inside.

The canteen is complete. There are 12 items of big stuff, knives, forks. fish knives, fish forks, cake knives, cake forks, and lots of items as what we rarely use, crumb scoop, fish serving knife, fish serving fork, nut crackers and on and on. It is complete. No item is missing after all these years.

At the dinner, we use a lot of beautiful cutlery.

The next day when all is washed and counted, oh dear, I am one silver teaspoon short.

I am uneasy but not yet terribly worried as this has happened before. A fork goes missing but is found in the wrong drawer, a soup spoon, after a couple of days of absence, shows up amongst the daily usage knives and forks.

The silver teaspoon does not show. My anxiety rises. I search everywhere. Nothing.

I even recover the post party garbage bag from the garbage depot and go through it piece by piece. Nothing.

I am very unhappy. I am the person who destroyed the integrity of the family canteen.

There is now one piece missing. All these years, all those meals.

I am unworthy.

I have mentioned before the industrial build of my kitchen sink’s drainage system. It is one of the things that I particularly like about the apartment. The sink is not draining very well so I rummage around in the drainage basket.

I find the spoon.

I am restored.

I feel so much better.

I go to look at Black faced Spoonbills, about 400 in the whole world. Their rarity corresponds with my silver teaspoon.