The Village Shop Sold Me A Newspaper From A Week That Had Not Happened

I want to say up front that I lost the newspaper, which makes this worthless as evidence, and I know it, and I am telling it anyway because I have carried it for eleven years.

I was on a walking holiday. Small village, one shop, a woman behind the counter who was doing a crossword.

I bought a paper and a pasty and sat on a bench.

The paper was the right paper. The masthead was right. The price was right.

The date was eight days ahead.

I want to tell you I noticed immediately. I did not. I read half of it — I read a whole column about a politician saying something stupid — before I looked at the top of the page.

Then I sat there for a while with a cold pasty.

The football results were wrong. I remember two of them. One was a 3-1 that I knew, absolutely, had not happened, because I had listened to that match on the radio two days before and it had been a 1-1.

Eight days later, both teams played again, and the score was 3-1, and it was the same two teams, and I sat in my kitchen with the radio on and felt the floor go soft.

I went back to the shop that same afternoon — that same afternoon, eleven years ago — and I asked the woman where they got their papers.

She said, "The van comes at six."

I said, "This is next week's."

She took it off me, looked at it, and gave it back, and she said — and this is verbatim, I have never forgotten it — "That'll be the van, then."

And she went back to her crossword.

I left the paper in a bed and breakfast, in the drawer of a bedside table, because I was twenty-four and stupid and I thought I would come back for it.

Nobody believes this. My wife thinks I misread a date, and honestly, that is the most likely thing in the world, and I have said so to myself a thousand times in a thousand bad nights.

But I did not misread 3-1.