Here’s a cautionary tale about the perils of not knowing the minutiae of your job description and being too honest, I came across this week.
I don’t know about you but I tend not to carry my gold bars about with me. They are too damn heavy. For some unaccountable reason a person or persons unknown hid seven of the things, each weighing a kilo and collectively worth around £240,000, in a rubbish bin in South Korea’s Incheon International Airport. A diligent cleaner found them.
Under the country’s Lost Articles Act, if an owner doesn’t come forward within six months to claim their property, the finder is entitled to receive between 5 and 30% of the value of the goods – up to a cool £48,000 in this case.
Alas, the cleaner is likely to miss out on this bonanza. His employers, spoil sports that they are, have said that he was “working as airport staff and it is part of a cleaner’s job to find lost things.”
He should have phoned a friend!
Or perhaps he could lend the Norbertine monks of the Belgian town of Grimbergen a hand. They are desperately combing through their library and archives in search of the ancient recipe for Grimbergen beer. The monks last brewed the famous dark beer in 1797 but then the French revolution turned their quiet, ordered life upside down.
Confusingly, there already is a Grimbergen beer commercially available but it is brewed by the Belgian beer giants, Alken-Maes, for the local market and Carlsberg for international topers. Sportingly, the two brewers are giving financial assistance to the monks to establish a micro-brewery on the very spot where their predecessors brewed. They hope to have their first batches ready for New Year 2020.
All that is missing is the recipe.
Perhaps there is a clue in their motto, ardet nec consumitur (burned but not destroyed). I would check the grates.
windowthroughtime 