John Walsh: btw

We've all left umbrellas in hotel rooms, but this is ridiculous. Travelodge has published a list of things left on its premises in the past year, including a 6ftx6ft remote-control model helicopter, a cat, and a 12,000 diamond necklace. The company reports an increase in forgotten electrical goods and computer-game consoles, but notes a regrettable tendency for guests to leave behind sex toys, false teeth, glass eyes and artificial limbs. Someone even forgot a cremation urn full of a relative's ashes. As for the owner of a suitcase of diamond jewellery, and the driver who left the keys to a Bentley behind, both must be kicking themselves. While the city bigwig who forgot his mayoral chains of office presumably died of embarrassment before he could reclaim them.

* In the annals of creative revenge, high marks go to the ex-girlfriend who cut the crotch out of all her ex-beloved's trousers, and the wronged wife who distributed her husband's cellar of premier cru clarets on her neighbours' front doorsteps. But hats off to Neil Medley from Ilkley, West Yorkshire, who took a curious revenge on his wife after their divorce. He put 5,000 of her clothes in a garden incinerator and burnt one shoe of every pair she owned. Then he sent her a text saying the missing shoes had gone to Heather Mills McCartney. Nasty. And what drove Neil over the brink of husbandly fury? It was when his wife Jane sold his personalised car number plate. Well, I mean. Some things you can forgive, but messing with a chap's number plates ...

* Anniversary of the week is surely that of Harry Bensley, an Edwardian playboy who accepted a bet 100 years ago, in 1908. To settle a gambling debt, he took a 21,000 wager from J Pierrepoint Morgan that he couldn't travel the world wearing an iron mask and pushing a pram; the bet required him to take nothing apart from 1 and a change of underwear, to make money selling postcards and to find a wife who would marry him without ever seeing his face. Bensley left Trafalgar Square and returned six years later, duly married, to claim his reward. Now his descendants claim he simply hung out in France until the war drove him home. What spoilsports. How can they let the facts ruin a good story?

* Somewhere in A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell warns younger readers about "the mid-twenties menopause," when 26-year-olds gaze in horror at the prospect of becoming 30 with no wife, offspring, first million or first novel to be seen. It seems nothing changes. A poll of twentysomethings by Gumtree.com found 86 per cent were stressed by "pressure to succeed" in relationships, finances and jobs. The feeling you're not earning enough is universal, and to be concerned about the property market is understandable; but to feel pressured by society's expectations that you should be finding a partner and having children seems weirdly old-fashioned. After retro-architecture and retro-kitchenwear, is this retro-morality?