ABSTRACT
Recently I found a pen and handed it in to the receptionist. This was no smudgy Bic but the gold-plated proper sort you might get for a twenty-first birthday. As I left I wondered what would become of it and whether it would be claimed, whether I might even be able to claim it later. But as I passed the students’ union a scenario gripped me. I imagined coming to the end of a lecture, whipping out my pen and jotting down the time of a tutorial, to look up and find horror on the face of the student at my scandalous possession of her lost love token, wedding gift, grandfather’s keepsake or what have you – and pretending it to be mine! What would you say? ‘I found it and got it back from the reception desk?’ That’d take far too many words and would make one sound far too active, like trying to over-explain a theft you genuinely had nothing to do with. ‘It was given me?’ Better – makes you the passive object of someone else’s action and, because it was given to us both in a weird sense, you could be seen to be an equivalent of the real owner. Umm, yes, that’d sound better.
