My wife and I had been visiting Holland, and at the start of this week we were in Amsterdam. We always stay in a splendid little hotel called The Owl, situated down a one way street just behind The Marriott.  On Tuesday morning my wife was having a late breakfast - I had already finished and was sitting in the hotel garden talking to a friend. Suddenly my wife appeared and said “I think I’ve lost my handbag.” We did all the usual things - asking people if they’d taken it by mistake, looking under tables, checking our room. But it soon became apparent that the bag had been stolen, together with my wife’s passport, credit cards, mobile phone, etc. etc.  Peter, at the desk, then had the bright idea of checking the video footage of the lobby. True to form, we soon identified a non-guest hurrying past the front desk with my wife’s bag clutched under one arm. Peter then checked further back and found further video evidence of the same man entering the hotel forty-five minutes earlier and posing as a guest in the breakfast room - the miscreant had obviously been waiting for someone to leave their bag at the table for a few seconds while getting themselves a fourth cup of coffee from the buffet, and my wife - a renowned coffee addict, in the very best, and non-Dutch, sense of the word, needless to say - was the first to oblige.

Cue telephone calls to credit card shredders back in England, cue visits from the local police, cue visits to the local police station, cue fifty minute interviews with extremely sympathetic local policemen and policewomen, cue cups of tea from the Dutch police network’s private stock, cue calls to the very helpful British Consulate, cue visits to the photographer to get new passport photos for my wife. All this took maybe four hours. Clutching the photographs [my wife was looking pretty glum in them, as her ranch in Mexico had been burgled just the week before], we decided to walk through the park to get her replacement passport at the Consulate. On our way, knowing that the thief had fled in that direction, we went through the motions of looking in all the bushes, flower beds and litter bins in the vain hope that our robber may have dumped the bag in transit after rifling it for cash.

About three quarters of a mile from the hotel we decided to give up looking - it was more than four hours since the robbery, and we figured that the bagmen and bagladies of Amsterdam would have done their rounds by now and hoovered the thing up. “Let’s check in one last bin,” I said to my wife. We trudged across to a monstrous green bin situated near a Hot Dog stand. We looked in, feeling rather drained. “That’s my bag!!” shouted my wife. And there it was, Readers. Intact. Top of the heap. Passport and credit cards and little pink purse and lipsticks and compacts and sunglasses and reading glasses and whatever else women keep in their handbags all in situ. And not even a ketchup stain on it. We high-fived the half dozen or so kids sitting on a bench nearby, and scuttled back to our hotel to recount the good news to all our friends. Returning to our room, we found that the Owl Team [the hotel management and staff] had presented my wife with a lovely bouquet of flowers to cheer her up. Peter, the owner, said he hadn’t heard the like in all his years at the hotel. He was even more stunned when we told him that an Amsterdam taxi driver had given us a lift from the police station to our hotel FOR FREE. “This is impossible,” he cried. “The bag I can believe. The passport I can believe. The credit cards I can believe. The video evidence I can believe. But an Amsterdam taxi driver not charging for a fare? No. That? Never.”