MISSING: ONE PIECE OF PAPER

Two days into the festival, and already disaster has struck. I can't believe it. The unimaginable has happened: I've just discovered that I've lost one of the pages of my ‘notebook'. My ‘notebook' is made out of three little pads of Hotel Mercure loose-leaf note paper. It has no front or back cover, and to the untrained eye might look very much like some ratty old shop receipts or a bit of toilet paper stuck to a shoe. But it's now Thursday, and this is the first ‘official column' I'm supposed to write since arriving on Tuesday, and pages 5-6 of my important notebook are missing. What am I supposed to do? It currently jumps from: ‘Got the internet working in my hotel room - looked at Facebook and wondered if I should find and ‘friend' the people that I've just met in real life. ‘Also realised that my shirt smelled funny ...' [p.4] to: ‘... a bit like a ‘smoker's club' - have begun to worry that all the ‘best' conversations are happening without me in Dutch.' [p.7] So I've decided to offer a reward for pages 5-6 which probably contain all kinds of illuminating notes on the things I've done since I arrived at Crossing Border: impressions of the little acoustic gig we went to in the Border Kitchen on Tuesday night, the film premiere (Diary of a Times Square Thief) we saw on Wednesday, and of the other writers and translators I've met. Yep. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realise that pages 5-6 must contain all the good stuff; the scandalous, career-destroying revelations about the other writers and translators, and the answers to such interesting questions as ‘Is a novel still your work once it's been translated?' Oh dear. All I'm left with is the other, more pedestrian stuff: my awkward, silent hour-long taxi ride from the airport, my worry about ‘tipping or not tipping', the plugging in of my laptop and looking at Facebook in my hotel room, and general confusion about how I somehow managed to pack a whole suitcase of unwashed clothes. I'm so sorry. So if anyone finds a small tangled piece of paper with an official red ‘M' in the right-hand corner and some spidery black handwriting on it - maybe you will see an old man blowing his nose into it during a break between performances, or maybe a child is halfway through folding it into a paper aeroplane - I will happily offer you ... um ... a couple of official Hotel Mercure sweets (lemon flavour), a mostly-drunk can of sparkling ‘Sourcy' brand mineral water, three bottles of ‘Tonus' hair and body gel (one half-used), and a sign that you can hang from your door handle which says ‘Please make up the room' in four different languages. I'm in room 301, by the way. (If you don't fancy the reward, just stick it under the door.)