I sympathise with the plight of Stephen Morris, who left his priceless violin on a train and was happily reunited with it (No strings attached: musician reunited with his missing £250,000 violin, 4 November). I had a similar experience earlier this year, getting off the King’s Lynn train at Cambridge and leaving my Northumbrian small pipes behind. I despaired, having experienced the deficiencies of the giant lost property office at the Thameslink station. However, I received a phone call from Mandy at King’s Lynn station, who had found the pipes and noticed my mobile number on the case. It seems she maintains a kind of lost property cupboard, out of commitment to an ethos of customer service that I had assumed was all but lost. Better still, she gave the pipes to Tom, her train driver friend, who brought them back to Cambridge on the next train. I met him on platform 7, exchanged my pipes for a bottle of champagne for Mandy, and played him a tune, which he appreciated: he turned out by an extraordinary coincidence to be the nephew of a Northumbrian piper from Newcastle.
Both stories are testaments to human decency, as well as timely warnings to absent-minded musicians.
Prof Andrew Burn
Cambridge
